


A Syllabus of Questions for 
Use by Discussion Classes 





THE INQUIRY 
st 52nd Street, New York City 





From the library of 
KolalaWa (onc laren t-leL chy 
(1889-1 983) | 


Third President and Professor of Ecumenics 
Princeton Theological Seminary 
1936-1959 








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Missions and World Problems 


A Syllabus of Questions for 
Use by Discussion Classes 


Preliminary Edition 


Commission on International Relations of the 
National Conference on the Christian 


Way of Life 
129 East 52nd Street, New York City 


ean OF PRICED 









SEP 11 1992 


Heovoaien sews 





Distributed by 


ASSOCIATION PRESS 
New York: 347 Madison Avenue 
and 


THE WOMANS PRS perv oF prmeveron 


New York: 600 Lexington 
1925 


OCT 1 1 20% 


THROLOGIOAL SEMINARY 


vr, 


Copyright, 1925, by 
R. E. McCuitocs 


for The National Conference on the 
Christian Way of Life 


Printed in the United States of America 


Price, in paper, 75 cenis; in cloth, $1.00 


+e 


- TABLE OF CONTENTS 


PAGE 
AN TRODCOLIOM Ite eee hile ak beau a aia lath ls bee 5 
CuHapTeR I. Missionsand Race Problems ... . 9 


CuHapTeR II. Missions and the Migration of Peoples . 28 
CuHapter III. Missions, World Health, and Social 


Reform 46 
CuHapTER IV. Missions and the Economic System of 

the Western World .... .. 65 
CHapTeR V. Missionsand World Peace . .... 94 
CuHapTeR VI. Missions and a World Outlook. . . . 112 
RI EECRULEDOOKES fy a eite) Cok ae Moll nih Goa « Mee teh Ge ee LO 
MELON DIME BOR OREPICS IU mis anise) sy ore ae Wh slate Ge aie he TAL BO 


PUSRORS EC UOTE Rey oiut acelc UnG sei Cimay ibe ire rte ie Legee 





INTRODUCTION 


The Inquiry 


Tus syllabus is issued in connection with an Inquiry that 
is being conducted as part of the National Conference on 
the Christian Way of Life. This venture had its formal 
origin in a resolution by the Administrative Committee of 
the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 
It was authorized to study “the meaning of Christianity for 
human relationships with special attention to industry, 
citizenship, and race relations in the United States, and the 
function of the Church in social and civic affairs.” The 
conference is independent, however, both as to its findings 
and as to its financial support. 


Correspondence 


For the sake of brevity the National Conference on the 
Christian Way of Life is referred to as The Inquiry. For 
further information address The Inquiry, 129 East 52nd 
Street, New York City. 


This Syllabus 


“Missions and World Problems” has been prepared in 
response to a sense of need for such a study expressed by 
various leaders related to the organized missionary activities 
having their headquarters in the United States. In gen- 
eral, a syllabus of the type of “International Problems and 
the Christian Way of Life” (the first of the publications 
issued by The Inquiry) was desired. The preparation of the 
syllabus has been under the direction of The Inquiry’s Com- 
mission on International Relations, but frequent conference 
has been had with those whose vision and request called 
forth this study. 

5 


6 Introduction 


Each chapter consists of a set of questions intended to 
stimulate thought and discussion of the main aspects of the 
problems dealt with, and also, quotations from books and 
magazines giving suggestive comments. In some cases the 
excerpts set forth conflicting opinions, in others variant 
approaches to the consideration of great issues are exhib- 
ited. In no cases are the quotations to be regarded as ex- 
haustive. All that can be hoped from the use of the syllabus 
is a larger appreciation of the complexity and urgency of 
the problems, and of the bearing of these problems and the 
enterprise of missions on each other. For the solution of 
the problems there will be required all the resources of char- 
acter, all the knowledge, all the best social technique avail- 
able to men and women of good will at work cooperatively 
everywhere throughout the world. 

No aitempt has been made in this syllabus to provide 
shock absorbers for the fearful or obscurantist folk who 
shrink from seeing things as they are. On the other hand, no 
comfort has intentionally been provided for those who are 
inclined to feel that a moral struggle to bring about indi- 
vidual and social change in the direction of a better world 
is futile. Moreover, implicit in the whole presentation is the 
confidence that if such moral struggle is to go on, faith and 
hope and love of a Christian sort, and a way of life based 
thereon, are incomparably the greatest potentialities to be 
reckoned with. 


How to Use This Syllabus 


Individual study and group discussion.—The questions 
may be used by individuals, and it is hoped that such use 
may be widely made. The best results will be secured 
through group discussion. In any case it is earnestly 
requested that the results be preserved and reported for use 
in the revision of further editions of this syllabus which is 
now issued in tentative form. 

Length of couwrse.—lt is desirable that groups shall hold 


Introduction 7 


from six to twelve sessions. The impossibility of discussing 
adequately at any one session all the questions included in 
a single section is frankly recognized, and the suggestion 
is made that each group should select those chapters and 
questions which it deems most important and valuable for its 
use. It is better to treat one or two questions of each section 
fully than to pass hastily over the entire outline. 

Help for leaders.—Leaders of discussion groups on this 
and other subjects will find aid in a pamphlet entitled “A 
Cooperative Technique for Conflict,” a little treatise on dis- 
cussion. It may be obtained from The Inquiry, 129 East 
52nd Street, New York City. “The How and Why of Discus- 
sion,” by Professor Harrison Elliott, can be had from the 
Association Press, 347 Madison Avenue, New York City. 


nat 
iT.) 





CHAPTER I 
MISSIONS AND RACE PROBLEMS 


QUESTIONS 


A. Racial Consciousness and the Missionary Motive. 


1. 


bo 


Co 


What motives make real appeal to you as disposing 
you to send missionaries to yellow, brown, and black 
peoples? Which of these motives, if any, either imply, 
or fall in with, the idea of these peoples being inferior 
to the white race? 


. What method of appraisal of racial capacity would 


you regard as trustworthy and satisfactory? 

a. A comparison of the finest intellects or personali- 
ties of each race? 

b. A comparison of racial achievements in some par- 
ticular cultural sphere, such as art, science or 
letters ? 

e. A comparison of average cultural advance on the 
part of each race, such as with respect to literacy? 

d. A comparison of the relative number of individuals 
who achieve high cultural standards? 

e. A comparison of the relative participation in the 
use of modern scientific utilities and devices? 

f. A comparison of the relative use that has been made 
of the natural resources within reach of each group? 

What other possible criteria of judgment would you 

suggest? 


. In what ways, if any, do you expect the average white 


man to be superior in capacity to the Oriental of the 

same walk in life? Capacity with respect to what? 

In judging the relative capacity of white and Oriental, 

what allowance would you make for the white man’s 
9 


10 


Missions and World Problems 


social inheritance of a fund of power-conferring 
knowledge, equipment, and technique? Does the fact 
that white races developed this knowledge first estab- 
lish them as intellectually superior to the others? 


. What differences of capacity do you expect to find be- 


tween a man of the yellow and one of the brown peo- 
ples, between a man of the yellow and one of the black 
peoples, between a man of the brown and one of the 
black? Why? Do these differences pertain to all 
members of each race? 


. What bearing do your answers have on your attitude 


toward sending missionaries to these peoples? On the 
relative emphasis you would put on various types of 
home mission work within the United States? 


. Can you tell how and when you came to have the par- 


ticular attitude you acknowledge? Did it come from 
the traditional attitude of your fellows? Did it come 
from an assured knowledge of the peoples concerned? 
Did it come from a careful study of racial capacities ? 
Did it come from casual contacts with individual mem- 
bers of these races? 


. Should the idea be fostered that the Christian tra- 


dition itself stands to gain from the fuller participa- 
tion of Asiatic and African peoples in Christian life 
and service? 


. Race Contacts in Mission Lands and Their Bearing on 


Mission Policy and Success. 


We 


Where are missionaries abroad finding particular diffi- 
culty in their work because of racial irritations? 
Where in this country? What are the specific occa- 
sions for these irritations? 


. In what ways do difficult interracial situations on the 


mission field turn on questions of leadership? 


. Do you regard any race as permanently incapacitated 


for providing its own leadership? What races and 


Race Problems 11 


why? How would this attitude influence your pres- 
entation of the Christian religion to these races? To 
your own children? 

4, What processes would you recommend to the missions 
for the discovery and development of inherent racial 
capacities in the more gifted members of the races they 
serve? What suggestions does modern education offer 
at this point? Should the missionaries encourage 
each of these races to discover and train its own 
leaders? If so, what bearing does this have on mis- 
sionary method and policy? If not, how may mis- 
sions best proceed to the processes of discovery and 
training essential to the larger results? 

5. Just what contributions can missions make to the 
mitigation of racial antipathies and conflicts in the 
fields abroad to which missionaries go? To the bet- 
terment of race relations in the United States? 

6. In view of the present world situation in regard to 
race, just what emphasis in the work of the mission- 
aries should be placed on promoting racial adjust- 
ments? Should the long established and well tested 
methods of evangelism, education, medical and philan- 
thropic work be enlarged to include direct efforts 
toward the amelioration of racial tension, or may the 
methods named be expected in due course to bring 
about right race relationships as a normal by-product? 
Since the peoples of the missionary sending lands are, 
in many cases, politically in control of the peoples in 
“mission lands,” what should the Christian citizens of 
the former do to Christianize the colonial policies and 
contacts of their own nations? 


C. Race Problems in the Home-base Lands and Their Bear- 
ing on Missionary Advance Abroad. 


1. How does racial irritation in lands sending mis- 
sionaries abroad tend to affect missionary success 


12 Missions and World Problems 


in the fields to which the missionaries are sent? What 
examples can you give of racial strain or clashes at 
home creating racial strain in the mission field? 

2. What are the effects of the assertion of superiority on 
the part of the members of the white race on the atti- 
tude of the darker peoples toward the missionaries? 

3. In what respects is the attitude towards Orien- 
tals or Africans that you would expect of your mis- 
sionaries not to be expected of Christians in the 
United States in dealing with other racial groups in 
this country? Would you make any distinctions 
among racial groups in the United States in this con- 
nection? Why? 

4. What, if anything, can we in America learn from mis- 
sions and mission fields abroad with respect to pro- 
moting race adjustments that can be of service in 
facing race problems here? Just what is being accom- 
plished by the home mission agencies in the United 
States that might help toward the solution of these 
race problems in other parts of the world? 


QUOTATIONS 


Very little serious thought has as yet been given to the 
question how these diverse peoples who in this unified world 
have got to live their lives together may learn to live together 
in peace and harmonious cooperation. Preceding genera- 
tions by their science, their invention, their energy and their 
enterprise have unawares created conditions which leave us 
with a stupendous moral problem. Unless our generation 
and following generations can find a solution of that prob- 
lem, the capacity for destruction which scientific knowledge 
has given to mankind may prove the death-warrant of 
civilization. 

Among all the antagonisms which bring men into conflict 
with one another, those of which the adjustment is likely in 
the end to prove most difficult and which hold the most 
sinister possibilities of disaster are the antagonisms which 
exist, or which may arise, between the different races of the 


Race Problems 13 


world. The seriousness lies not so much in the physical 
differences of race and color as in the association of these 
physical differences with the claims of nationality, which 
have in the past been the most potent source of wars in 
Europe, and with conflicting economic interests. 

In various ways racial differences tend to aggravate and 
embitter those antagonisms which are found among men 
independently of race, arising, for example, out of the rela- 
tions of governors and governed, or of employers and 
employed, or out of struggle and rivalry for wealth and 
power. 

If we are to deal with this racial problem which is so 
fundamental in our life today, the first necessity is that we 
should understand it. And we cannot reach a real under- 
standing of it by intellectual study alone. To understand 
it we have to learn to see it from both sides, to enter sym- 
pathetically into the feelings and thoughts of other races. 
The surest and quickest road to understanding is to become 
friends with someone belonging to another race. Friendship, 
and only friendship, will teach us to see things through his 
eyes—to understand how it feels to be a Chinese, an Indian 
or an African in a world in which political and economic 
power and privilege are so largely in the hands of the white 
peoples. For that is one of the facts which makes the racial 
issue so acute.—F rom an address by J. H. Oldham, at a Con- 
ference on International and Missionary Questions, Man- 
chester, England, January 1, 1925. 


There are on the earth some fifty-three million square 
miles of habitable land surface. Of those miles forty-seven 
million are under white dominance—or nearly nine-tenths 
of the whole habitable area of the world. Of the remaining 
six million square miles over four million square miles are 
ruled by the yellow races—the Chinese and the Japanese, the 
latter now having sway over Korea, Formosa, and the Pacific 
islands that Germany used to govern north of the equator. 

Of all this vast area of forty-seven million square miles 
controlled by the white races, by far the greater part is 
under the hand of the English-speaking peoples. .. . 

That white leadership of the world . . . is the dominating 
feature in the world’s political landscape. We take it for 
granted. Yet as we have seen, it is, when viewed across the 
vast perspectives of history, a modern growth. 


14 Missions and World Problems 


What has produced it? Can it survive? Ought it to 
persist ?—Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” pp. 18, 19. 


A world full of suspicion and distrust, of national antag- 
onisms and hatreds, is in the highest degree unfavorable 
to the progress of missionary effort. Those who bear the 
Christian message are subject to an almost fatal disad- 
vantage when the race to which they belong is the object 
of deep-rooted dislike, The words ... purporting to repre- 
sent the attitude of natives in South Africa—‘Christianity 
is the white man’s religion and must be uprooted; we must 
unite to compass our freedom, opposing the white man tooth 
and nail,’—deserve to be deeply pondered in relation to 
the whole situation in the world today. It will avail little 
to redouble our efforts, to multiply our forces, to improve 
our methods and organization if a chasm of mistrust yawns 
between us and those whom we would reach.—International 
Review of Missions, January, 1921, p. 60. 


Christianity has been permeating the lump of human life 
for nineteen centuries, but the problem is not less acute now 
than when Jesus began to live and to preach good will to 
alli men. Race-strife is not less violent in so-called Chris- 
tian lands than it is among the peoples who have not had 
the blessings of the Christian religion for centuries. Ameri- 
cans may pride themselves on being more democratic and 
more Christian than other peoples but the problem is still 
acute here. When we look at some facts in Christian 
nations, especially in our own nation, it seems almost to 
be a question whether even Christianity can solve it. If not 
can we still claim that Christianity has the element of uni- 
versality adequate to bring into one family all the peoples 
of the world, here as well as hereafter? 

Christianity is the manifestation of a spirit, an attitude 
of mind, a dynamic for life. It is an ideal put into a human 
problem with a view to its solution. It is a power at work 
within the problem itself. It is not, then, primarily some- 
thing towards which men move. It is rather something 
with which men progress in the direction of their possible 
achievement, individual and social. The Christian spirit 
must enter into the very men and women who are most 
obstinately antagonistic to other races and must change 
them into real brothers. The mountain vision must be made 
actual in the midst of imperfect people in the valley below. 


Race Problems 15 


The Christian solution of the racial problem must take 
all the facts of human nature and experience into consider- 
ation in order that betterment may result. Biology and 
history—all the past—are involved in that obstinate fact 
of race. There is a “biological drive,” a cultural drive; 
there is also a Christian drive. These must cooperate in 
order to help our violent humanity to come more under the 
influence of good will to all men. The Christian spirit must 
solve the problem from within the facts of human nature, 
strife, bitterness, narrowness, or confess defeat. Otherwise 
it cannot even touch the hem of the problem. It must come 
down from the heavens and live among men in order that it 
may live within men. President Charles Cuthbert Hall once 
said that “theoretical belief in the unity of the race is 
unserviceable unless it survives in the presence of facts.”— 
Frank L. Anderson, Missionary Review of the World, July 
1924, pp. 533, 534. 


That discrimination, prejudice, and even hatred are shown 
toward dark races by members of the white race, the major- 
ity of whom profess to follow Jesus Christ, is one of the 
astounding anomalies of the modern world. The white 
races are not alone in this sin. It would be easy to show 
how other races also have been guilty. But the white peoples 
as a whole have sinned against greater light, and in spite 
of the teaching of their acknowledged Lord that “Whosoever 
shall do the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my 
brother, and sister, and mother,” and of His great apostle 
who said, “He hath made of one every nation of men,” and, 
“T bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family 
in heaven and on earth is named.” Before Jesus came among 
men inter-racial bitterness was rife. The Greek despised 
the barbarian, the Roman lorded it over all races, including 
his erstwhile teacher, the Greek, and the Hebrews held all 
but themselves to be beyond the pale of divine favor. Yet 
a few of the ancient sages caught glimpses of the equality of 
all races. It was a Roman who said, “I am a man and 
nothing human is foreign to me.” It was a Chinese who 
said, “All within the four seas are brothers.” But it 
remained for Jesus Christ to make this truth one of the 
pillars of His teaching and to base it for the first time 
upon a purely ethical and individual relationship to the 
Father of all. Furthermore, He bade His followers to make 
disciples on an equal footing of all peoples and races. 





16 Missions and World Problems 


It is against such a background that the apostasy of many 
of Christ’s professed followers today stands in such black 
relief. The hatred and abuse of colored races by the whites, 
or of white races by the colored is reminiscent of the jungle 
and of the primitive blood feud. That it persists even under 
the shadow of cross-tipped church spires proves not the 
impotence of Christ, but the infidelity of His disciples.— 
Editorial, Student World, July, 1921, pp. 111, 112. 


Until very recent years the average call to work abroad 
more or less unconsciously assumed western superiority. It 
was a romantic leadership which was held out to any young 
student who would go to the Orient. He was to stamp his 
influence on other peoples, share in making a new world, 
shape the destinies of backward, but changing countries, 
and lay out the lines upon which future development was 
to take place. Many of the interpretations of Africa and 
the East were tinged with a patronizing note. To such an 
extent has this point of view been absorbed that the head 
of one of our largest language schools for young mis- 
sionaries has declared that one of his chief responsibilities 
is to endeavor to eradicate from their minds false ideas of 
their future task. . . . One of the ablest missionaries 
now in India, looking back upon his experience of over forty- 
three years in that land, said that he regretted, among 
other errors, one serious mistake which he had made. He 
had not sufficiently estimated the potential capacity of the 
people. Therefore he had not expected as much from them 
as he should; and in consequence he feels that they had not 
developed and done as much as they might have done. 
Blessed is the one who is forewarned against unconscious 
influences which encourage the sense of superiority. 

Not all of the responsibility of possessing a right racial 
attitude, however, rests on the persons who go abroad. 
Before they reach the field they share attitudes of mind cur- 
rent in the West—often attitudes not helpful to the young 
missionary. One whose professional work brings him into 
touch with a large proportion of the junior missionaries 
coming to China complains that many of them come out 
“with the attitude that any condition they discover among 
the Chinese which is not in accordance with western tradi- 
tions and ideals is inferior.” The highest coordinating mis- 
sionary body in North America has shown its sensitiveness 
to this danger by giving a whole session to a discussion of 


Race Problems 17 


whether or not even the Churches of the West do not instil 
points of view which limit the usefulness of their mis- 
sionaries, and display attitudes, such as a sense of super- 
iority due to our wealth and prestige, a pride of race due 
to the present position of the white peoples, and an assertive 
quality naturally found in the propagandist, which as a 
matter of fact hinder the work abroad.—Daniel Johnson 
Fleming, “Whither Bound in Missions,” pp. 3, 4, 5-7. 


Our knowledge of the reactions of men living in diverse 
cultural forms and the study of the cultural forms them- 
selves lead us to infer that hereditary characteristics are 
irrelevant as compared to social conditions, and that ana- 
tomical form does not determine the cultural history of a 
people. It is particularly worth remarking that the current 
unfavorable opinion of the Negro is based largely on com- 
plete ignorance of African native conditions, and of Negro 
achievements in the industries and arts and in political 
organization, and that likewise the glorification of our own 
race is founded exclusively on a consideration of the cultural 
opportunities given to the few and on the complete neglect 
of the cultural primitiveness of the great mass of individ- 
uals, which finds expression intellectually in the uncritical 
acceptance of traditional attitudes and emotionally in the 
ease with which they succumb to the power of fashionable 
passions. We may say with certainty that the local types 
of a single race like the European are each so variable that 
fixed hereditary differences in mental characteristics be- 
tween the types as a whole are most unlikely. We may say, 
furthermore, that cultural anthropology makes the existence 
of fundamental racial differences very improbable—Franz 
Boas, “The Question of Racial Purity,” The American Mer- 
cury, October, 1924. 


It is always the selfishness of any race or people that pro- 
duces inter-racial friction. When white men begin to claim 
that they belong to the supreme race of the world and hence 
that their interests and integrity must be safeguarded at 
the expense of other races, then inter-racial friction begins. 
And when members of the yellow race begin to boast of their 
attainments, other races appear to them as contemptible 
inferiors. Both of these attitudes are fundamenally wrong 
in that they start with selfish ideas. The very fact that 
there exists such a regrettable phenomenon as the inter-racial 


18 Missions and World Problems 


problem, shows beyond dispute that our present world is 
seriously contaminated with selfishness and boastfulness; 
that there is need of radical purgation—Katsuji Kato, 
Student World, July, 1921, pp. 140, 141. 


In the last four hundred years the people who are classi- 
fied as Nordics have succeeded in getting control over most 
of the surface of the globe. The white race, led by this small 
fraction of itself, has come to feel that it has been destined to 
rule the two thirds of the human race that are not white. 
The colored races are beginning to revolt, and the scepter 
of domination is passing both from the white race as a whole 
and from that part of it which has been in peculiar posses- 
sion of it. This threat has been resisted with as much 
energy as has been the case with the passing of every 
order. The vocabulary of science has been appropriated 
and its methods prostituted to prove what men want 
to prove, namely, their moral right to keep what they want 
to keep... 

Further, since there is slight relation between the origina- 
tors and possessors of culture, it may often happen that the 
culture of the dominant race has been secured from the “in- 
ferior” race or culture. Anthropologists think that the 
method of working iron, whose use has been perhaps the 
greatest single asset to the white race, was originated by 
the Negro in Africa. The Greeks made a contribution to the 
world’s culture which does not correspond to the present 
status of the Greek people on the culture scale. And Korea, 
which Japan feels that she must rule because of Korea’s 
backwardness, gave Japan much that is now of highest value 
to Japan. In the region of the Mediterranean most of Euro- 
pean culture was developed. The Nordics after appropriat- 
ing the contribution repudiate the creators of it—Herbert 
A. Miller, “Races, Nations and Classes,” pp. 185, 136, 158. 


There was a time when the Church of the West could 
deliver its message over these tangled problems [racial and 
international relations] and be heard in spite of ignoring 
them. But now the Christian message can obtain a hearing 
only if the Christian leads in mutual international friend- 
ship and inter-racial fellowship. The East does not want 
the Gospel handed down to it by “superiors”; it wants it 
as revealed in the sharing of life. The West can share its 
life with the East only by doing away with racial discrimi- 


Race Problems 19 


nations and the use of violence to settle international con- 
troversies.—Editorial in The Chinese Recorder, March, 1924, 
p. 140. 


The missionary movement, an attempt on the part of cer- 
tain sections of the white race to carry out the ideals of 
Christ, with all its shortcomings has shown the only direc- 
tion in which we may hope to unravel the race snarl. And 
in the sense of promoting inter-racial and international 
cooperation and service—the keynote of the missionary move- 
ment—the nations have yet to learn how to be “missionary.” 
There are no “missionary nations.” The nations have their 
political and commercial agents—scattered throughout the 
whole world. They must provide also for agents who shall 
promote cooperation in the spiritual sphere as well as in the 
political and commercial spheres. The neglect of the former 
makes the two latter appear menacing rather than friendly. 
This is unnecessary. All three are legitimate parts of the 
world relationship now being called for. But who shall 
take the lead in completing this trinity of working world 
relationships? If the Christians fail here can it be done?— 
Frank Rawlinson, The Chinese Recorder, November, 1924, 
p. 707. 


All the manifold discontents of the Orient are bound up 
together in the clash of color. This is nothing new. Nature 
herself is responsible for it, since she gave a generally white 
complexion to all the peoples of the Occident and, in vary- 
ing degrees, a darker complexion to all those of the Orient. 
But it has acquired a dangerous significance with the white 
man’s assumption of superior and indefeasible rights based 
on the superiority of his race. He may couple the exercise 
of those rights with a fine sense of duty toward the colored 
races which he regards as his inferiors, as Kipling implied 
when he wrote of the “white man’s burden.” But, rightly or 
wrongly, the Oriental, who for a time admitted and acqui- 
esced with almost fatalistic resignation in the white man’s 
superiority, denies it today—denies it sometimes passion- 
ately—for all his atavistic instincts, reacting against the 
aggressive impact of occidental civilization, rebel as never 
before against it; sometimes contemptuously because 
increasing intercourse has made him too familiar with the 
seamy side of our civilization; sometimes though alas! more 
rarely because he has assimilated enough of its finer spirit 


20 Missions and World Problems 


to claim the rights of equal partnership in all that is best 
of it. 

So long as personal intercourse between the Occident and 
the Orient was confined within very narrow limits, the white 
man laid much less stress than he does today on mere racial 
superiority. To India, for instance, England has sent out 
on the whole her best. Social intercourse between people 
of different races with different beliefs and different customs 
and different domestic institutions was always difficult, but 
it has become far more difficult now that increased facili- 
ties of communication and the introduction of modern sci- 
entific appliances and industrial trading methods have led 
to the employment in subordinate capacities of a type of 
Europeans formerly almost unknown to the Orient, but now 
very much in evidence, with plenty of good qualities, but 
more prone than those of better breeding and education to 
boast of their racial superiority and to impress their sense 
of it somewhat roughly upon the Indians or other Orientals 
with whom they rub shoulders. It cannot be denied that 
racial hatred has often had its origin in the rancor created 
by personal insults to which the natives of oriental countries 
even of good position have occasionally been subjected by 
white men who fancied themselves, but were not, their 
betters. Industrial competition, at the same time, has inten- 
sified so rapidly all the world over that the Occident has 
been seized with a great fear lest it should be swamped by 
the cheaper labor and lower standards of life of the count- 
less millions of the Orient which it has itself equipped to 
become its competitors.—Sir Valentine Chirol, “The Occi- 
dent and the Orient,” pp. 210-212. 


Today the racial issue is raised all over the world. In 
this country [the United States] you have the color problem 
in your very midst. You have it again at your doors in the 
shape of Asiatic immigration. We in Europe are confronted 
with it along the great borderland of the Occident and the 
Orient extending through Northern Africa and across 
Western and Central Asia, from the northwestern Atlantic 
to the shores of the Indian Ocean, even beyond. Its solution 
bristles with difficulties, but, for my own part, I refuse 
to dismiss it as insoluble. I will say this, at any rate, that 
the more firmly we ourselves believe in the superiority of 
a civilization which, so far, it has been the privilege of the 
white man to build up in his Occidental homelands, the more 


Race Problems 21 


are we bound by its principles and the principles of the 
common Christianity, which are its one sure foundation, 
to do all in our power to temper the bitterness of a racial 
discord which, if it spreads and deepens, may threaten the 
future of the whole human race. 

Often as our own practice may have fallen short of our 
ideals, the common civilization of the Occident, to which 
America belongs quite as much as Europe, must surely set 
before us definite ideals for which we should all strive as 
nations and as individuals.—Sir Valentine Chirol, “The 
Occident and the Orient,” pp. 218, 214. 


A full-blooded Negro friend of mine, who served in France 
with the American Negro troops during the war, received a 
telegram recently from two of his white friends asking if 
he could come over to them—some hundreds of miles across 
America—for a day’s conference. He came, traveling 
through the night, spent the day in counsel, and journeyed 
back again through the night to his lecturing. My friend, 
who was a prince of high rank among the Fanti tribe, was 
educated in a Christian school on the west coast of Africa. 
He is now a graduate doctor of philosophy of Columbia by 
examination (one of the most distinguished degrees in 
America) and a university lecturer, but—because of his 
color—he was obliged to travel both ways sitting up in a 
“Jim Crow” car, as no sleeping berth on the railway was 
available for Negroes. . . . Would not most of us in such 
circumstances flame with a sense of injustice into burning 
resentment? As a matter of fact, his own power to rise 
above these ignominies is purely spiritual—it rests on a 
sturdy and radiant Christianity. And as a result he uses all 
his educational influence, his quite extraordinary powers 
of racy, convincing oratory, and his wit and wisdom as a 
committee man—in fact his whole life—in the interests of 
cooperation and mutual understanding between the races.— 
Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” pp. 72-74. 


Our so-called race problems are merely problems caused 
by our antipathies. | 

Now, the mental antipathies of men, like the fears of men, 
are very elemental, widespread, and momentous mental 
phenomena. But they are also in their fundamental nature 
extremely capricious, and extremely suggestible mental 
phenomena. Let the individual man alone, and he will feel 


22 Missions and World Problems 


antipathies for certain other human beings very much as any 
young child does—namely, quite capriciously—just as he 
will also feel all sorts of capricious likings for people. But 
train a man first to give names to his antipathies, and then 
to regard the antipathies thus named as sacred merely be- 
cause they have a name, and then you get the phenomena of 
racial hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on 
indefinitely. Such trained hatreds are peculiarly pathetic 
and peculiarly deceitful, because they combine in such a 
subtle way the elemental vehemence of the hatred that a 
child may feel for a stranger, or a cat for a dog, with the 
appearance of dignity and solemnity and even of duty 
which a name gives.—Josiah Royce, “Race Prejudices and 
Other American Questions,” pp. 47, 48. 


The traditional civilization of China had developed in 
almost complete independence of Europe, and had merits 
and demerits quite different from those of the West. It 
would be futile to attempt to strike a balance; whether 
our present culture is better or worse, on the whole, than 
that which seventeenth-century missionaries found in the 
Celestial Empire is a question as to which no prudent per- 
son would venture to pronounce. But it is easy to point to 
certain respects in which we are better than old China, and 
to other respects in which we are worse. If intercourse 
between Western nations and China is to be fruitful, we 
must cease to regard ourselves as missionaries of a superior 
civilization, or, worse still, as men who have a right to 
exploit, oppress, and swindle the Chinese because they are 
an “inferior” race. I do not see any reason to believe that 
the Chinese are inferior to ourselves; and I think most 
Europeans who have any intimate knowledge of China 
would take the same view. 

In comparing an alien culture with one’s own, one is 
forced to ask oneself questions more fundamental than any 
that usually arise in regard to home affairs. One is forced 
to ask: What are the things that I ultimately value? What 
would make me judge one sort of society more desirable 
than another sort? What sort of ends should I most wish 
to see realized in the world? Different people will answer 
these questions differently, and I do not know of any argu- 
ment by which I could persuade a man who gave an answer 
different from my own.—Bertrand Russell, “The Problem of 
China,” pp. 4, 5. 


Race Problems 23 


Racialism in Africa is pointing the way to race hatred 
and disastrous strife, unless mutual distrust can be under- 
mined and service substituted for narrow self-advancement 
as the foundation principle of healthy growth. 

There is no solvent for the problem, unless the leaders of 
the backward race can be imbued with the spirit of Jesus 
Christ, and unless white people also will find strength from 
the same source to fulfill international obligations, and to 
foster religiously the growth of Africa towards maturity, 
that she may share with them the privilege of service to 
the world, under the leadership of a common Master of the 
Universe.—H. D. Hooper, “Africa in the Making,” p. 39. 


In the light of the sensitive temper and strain in which we 
find the world today, I ask you in shame, what influence 
we may expect to exert as laymen in the foreign mission 
program of our Church, when our own Congress passes an 
immigration law made possible by our false assumption 
that we have a right to do as we please in our own country 
without due consideration of others? I was in Japan when 
that act was passed. It was impossible to explain to the 
Japanese why an ideal religion of love which had entered 
the United States with its first settlers had so failed. The 
program of foreign missions in your Church and mine is 
useless, until Christian laymen rid themselves of a race 
prejudice which often amounts to hatred. I am not speak- 
ing abstractly. I have encountered multiplied instances 
among men in the United States and abroad who are called 
Christians who deny all Christ’s teaching about love by their 
attitude toward foreign people—Robert A. Doan, in an 
address at the Washington Foreign Missions Convention, 
1925, Student Volunteer Movement Bulletin, March, 1925, 
Dp LOS LL: 


From the earliest beginnings of history, India has had 
her own problem constantly before her—it is the race prob- 
lem. Each nation must be conscious of its mission and we, 
in India, must realize that we cut a poor figure when we 
are trying to be political, simply because we have not yet 
been finally able to accomplish what was set before us by 
our providence. 

This problem of race unity which we have been trying to 
solve for so many years has likewise to be faced by you here 
in America. Many people in this country ask me what is 


24 Missions and World Problems 


happening as to the caste distinctions in India. But when 
this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior 
air. And I feel tempted to put the same question to our 
American critics with a slight modification, “What have you 
done with the Red Indian and the Negro?’ For you have 
not got over your attitude of caste toward them. You have 
used violent methods to keep aloof from other races, but 
until you have solved the question here in America, you have 
no right to question India.—Rabindranath Tagore, “Na- 
tionalism,” pp. 118, 119. 


The kind of missionaries that Africa will receive in the 
near future will be determined by the kind of civilization 
the Western nations produce. If the so-called Western 
Christian nations fail to follow Jesus, if they fail to do 
away with un-Christian practices, . . . Africa will be forced 
to ally herself with Mohammedan followers, for Mohammed- 
ans value the spirit of brotherhood.—Simbini M. Nkomo, 
Student World, January, 1924, p. 19. 


Today in Christian America, the God-created black man, 
notwithstanding his Christian affiliations, intelligence or 
social prominence, is still a slave and a serf, perhaps worse 
than in the dramatic days of world-famed “Uncle Tom’s 
Cabin.” He or she is still liable to be brutally flogged, 
kicked, knocked about, imprisoned, shot dead or lynched, at 
the will and pleasure of the bloodthirsty and savage Ameri- 
can Tin God. ... Can you imagine the striking contrast 
between Caucasian Christianity and Islam, the religion of 
humanity? So utterly preposterous, and absurd, and so 
scientifically illogical is color prejudice, that I will not waste 
time in controversy.—Prof. Abdul Karim Kpakpa-Quartey, 
Islamic Review, vol. 9, May, 1921, p. 188. 


By some means we must make sure that all students 
before leaving their homelands are fully advised regarding 
possible unpleasant experiences in our countries; they 
should be told frankly that racial and color prejudices pre- 
vail even among Christian people and are often manifested 
in discourtesy and discrimination in restaurants, hotels, 
barber shops, theatres, and public meeting places; that most 
of the people whom they will meet in the West are woefully 
ignorant concerning the culture, history, and customs of 
Oriental peoples and are likely to appear rude and to ask 


Race Problems 25 


many silly questions. Let the foreign student know that 
there is much un-Christlikeness in the social, moral, and 
religious life of Western Christianity. Some Christian 
American and English people may even regard the Oriental 
student as an intruder and may treat him accordingly. 
Again we must persist in telling the Oriental student that 
he will find much difficulty in gaining access to business 
and professional opportunities; Western banks, industries, 
hospitals, schools, Christian Associations, and churches are 
reluctant to admit the Oriental student, no matter how 
sorely he needs employment and an opportunity to complete 
his training as a clerk, laborer, interne, teacher, or 
preacher. In many communities people will stare at the 
“foreigner” as an object of curiosity or will overdo the hos- 
pitality business in a patronizing manner. This leads to 
another suggestion, that our Movements double their efforts 
to see that each overseas student is treated as one of our 
students, naturally and without ostentation.—Charles 
DuBois Hurrey, Student World, January, 1924, p. 44. 


The future progress of mankind requires the continued 
cooperation of all races and nations; and their harmonious 
combination will be more profitably secured through the 
conference of individuals than by association in mass. Inter- 
racial goodwill can be spread by envoys, including national 
representatives appointed to secure international under- 
standing, by teachers spreading the light of culture from race 
to race, by missionaries whose interests are with the mass of 
the nation to which they go, and by traders whose success 
depends on the prosperity of the communities they serve. 
Individual concourse, in spite of occasional personal friction, 
is on the whole so useful that it should be encouraged 
between representatives of all suitable sections of the differ- 
ent nations. Association in mass, on the other hand, leads 
to jealousy, strife, and race hatred, which comes from the 
contact of aliens under conditions unfavorable to the growth 
of friendly feelings. Sympathetic intercourse between 
selected individuals, combined with the segregation of each 
race aS a whole, may be expected to lead to a happier and 
more peaceful world than the jarring friction inevitable 
when dissimilar people meet in competition for their daily 
bread. If the racial segregation which the world has 
inherited from the past is confirmed instead of being broken 
down by the modern ease of transport, Europe, North 


26 Missions and World Problems 


America, and Australia would naturally be the chief homes 
of the white race. Considering its contributions to human- 
ity, that would not be an unfair share. If the white man can 
secure these continents as his home he can, for the benefit of 
all, continue to conquer the forces of Nature and thereby 
strengthen the broad foundations of civilization QJ. W. 
Gregory, “The Menace of Colour,” pp. 241, 242. 


However unpopular the Jew, the Irishman and the Negro 
may be in certain minds and certain sections and at certain 
times (wartime not being one), the fact remains that the dis- 
tribution of human excellence in each of these races, as in the 
case of every other race, begins at zero and ends at infinity. 

The differences in racial excellence consist in the compara- 
tive numbers of individuals to be found in the higher reaches 
of the vast curve upward of human quality and serviceability. 
And to assess the relative values of the several stocks of 
mankind en masse is, one must concede, an exceedingly deli- 
cate and difficult, indeed perilous, task—From a letter of 
Roscoe Conklin Bruce to President A. L. Lowell, of Harvard 
University. 


Our greatest American race problem is the problem of 
relations between the white and black races. In some 
respects the situation is more hopeful, in others more alarm- 
ing than it has ever been. It is more hopeful because among 
both the black and the white people there is a growing body 
of the best men and women who realize the gravity of the 
situation, who are ready to cooperate in dealing with it, who 
believe that the application of Christianity to the problem 
is its only solution and who are convinced that Christianity 
must be applied to its solution. Indeed the Christian forces 
are the only forces which are really grappling with the issue. 
Nothing has ever shown the inadequacy and the helplessness 
of all other forces in facing a real and perilous race situa- 
tion more sharply than it has been shown in this matter. 
And no one can read the literature on this subject of twenty 
years ago and then the literature which the South is pro- 
ducing today without realizing the immense progress that 
has been made in the courage and justice and hopefulness 
with which the Christian people of both races in the South 
are meeting this real crisis—Robert E. Speer, “Race and 
Race Relations,” p. 348. 


Race Problems 27 


All natives of intelligence fasten on what is the central 
doctrine of the New Testament, if not of mission teaching, 
that every Christian is a child of God, a King’s son, the heir 
to all the world, a partner by right in the equal fraternity 
of all Christians. It was a Pope who said that if Catholics 
had had the Bible to write we should not have heard of 
Judas’s kiss or Peter’s tears. So, many missionaries in their 
hearts regret that in the Magnificat thanks are given for the 
dethronement of princes, and that the early Church 
encouraged intermarriage of European and Asiatic, insist- 
ing, indeed, that there was no real difference between them. 
In any case, missionaries say as little as possible about the 
doctrine of equal brotherhood. It is unjust to blame them. 
Any one who preached it as unreservedly as Paul did would 
have to leave the country. Not one European in a hundred 
in Africa believes that European and African Christians 
should behave to one another as members of the same family 
behave. This doctrine, expounded with peculiar apposite- 
ness to Africa in the Epistle to Philemon, is the real source 
of the antipathy to missions among Europeans abroad. For 
the fact must be faced that it is central in any type of 
Christianity that gives publicity to the New Testament. In 
certain circumstances that book plays the part of a revolu- 
tionist’s handbook. It is as idle to deny that fact as to 
assert that the book has no other part to play.—Norman 
Leys, “Kenya,” p. 241. 


I wish I had command of words and influence enough to 
impress upon an apathetic Western world one half of my 
conviction of the supreme importance of the Far Eastern 
peoples to the future government of the world; I wish I could 
describe in an arresting manner the visions I see of what 
will happen to our fragile civilization if we make no effort 
to reorganize the basic principles on which it depends, and, 
in that reorganization, find a worthy place for the hun- 
dreds of millions of yellow men whose leaders have raised the 
cup of our culture to their lips at a time when thoughtful 
Western men are beginning to realize that the brew from the 
West has within it poisons leading to self-destruction.— 
Stephen King-Hall, “Western Civilization and the Far East,” 
p. 331. 


CHAPTER II 


MISSIONS AND THE MIGRATION OF PEOPLES 


QUESTIONS 


. Why Peoples Migrate. 


14 


Where are marked movements of population now tak- 
ing place over the world? What peoples are moving 
in considerable numbers? 


. What are the causes back of the desire to move on the 


part of these peoples? What peoples are most eager 
to enter American territory ? 


. In the case of which people do these causes seem 


temporary? In which cases do they indicate a lack of 
opportunity due to backward social and economic con- 
ditions? 


. It is sometimes claimed that people who emigrate 


really run away (however unintentionally) from a 
social responsibility to make their own land a better 
place to live in? What would you say? By emigrat- 
ing to lands where better conditions prevail do they 
become in effect parasitic on the social inheritance of 
these lands? 


. What evidence bearing on this question can be found 


in the causes and consequences of migrations in the 
past? 


. Looked at collectively or individually, are people 


whose migrations are checked by immigration meas- 

ures of other lands being frustrated by such checks, or 

are these folk simply being forced to “brighten the 

corner where they are?” Is the frustrating of their 
28 


The Migration of Peoples 29 


desire to migrate an un-Christian act? Should all 
peoples have the right of free movement? 


B. Why Attempts Are Made to Block the Free Movement of 
Peoples. 


it 


What areas of the world are now open to peoples desir- 
ing to migrate? What areas are only partially open? 
To whom and in what measure are these places closed? 


. What areas are entirely closed? To whom? 
. In which of the areas closed to Asiatic or European 


immigration does the restriction spring mainly from a 
concern to preserve the racial “purity” of the present 
white population? 


. In which of these areas does the restriction spring 


mainly from a concern to preserve the standard of liv- 
ing of the present population? 


. In which of these areas is there a fear of losing a dis- 


tinctive national culture through permitting immigra- 
tion? 


. Judging by the talk about European or Asiatic immi- 


gration that you have heard, how much of popular 
opinion about “race purity” and “standards of liv- 
ing” in the United States rest on responsibly ascer- 
tained facts? 


. How far does a racial “superiority complex” enter into 


the purpose and effort on the part of one people to 
erect around their national domain barriers against 
the coming in of other racial groups? 


. What special Christian responsibility is there to 


raise popular opinion on these matters above the 
level of off-hand dogmatism, of judgments resting on 
isolated instances, of merely iterated catch-words that 
touch off popular prejudices? Are mission study 
classes appropriate places for such a responsibility to 
be met if it exists? What facilities has your study 
group for meeting such a responsibility ? 


30 


Missions and World Problems 


CO. The Immigration Policies of Western Nations and Mis- 
sion Success Among Foreign Peoples. 


if. 


What effects are to be noted with respect to the immi- 
gration policies of Western nations on the temper of 
the people of mission lands? On the temper of people 
from these lands who are already at home in the 
United States? 


. What effects are reasonably to be expected in the 


future, if so-called Christian nations continue to 
maintain rigid immigration policies? 


. What effects are the humanitarian efforts of mission- 


aries in the direction of promoting health, teaching 
sanitation, relieving distress, promoting Christian 
standards in marriage, raising standards of living, 
etc., likely to have with reference to population 
pressure in mission lands? 


. What responsibilities have the supporters of mis- 


sions in home-base lands with respect to the prob- 
lems of population among other peoples? What are 
the possible ways of dealing constructively with such 
problems? How far should the missionary movement 
concern itself with these problems in mission lands? 


. Just what are the implications of the Golden Rule 


with respect to this whole ‘question as between 
nations? Just how can the principle of the Golden 
Rule be put into practice in determining right rela- 
tions between peoples of different stages of culture or 
between those markedly different in standards of liv- 
ing? How can the right political action, if there 
should be such, be discovered and brought about? 


. Just what are the implications of the Golden Rule 


with respect to the treatment of immigrants from 
other lands who have already been admitted? Which 
would be the easier to forgive on the part say, of 
Italians or of Japanese, gates entirely or practically 


The Migration of Peoples ol 


closed at New York, San Francisco, and other ports, 
or the ungracious treatment of those who had entered 
before the gates were shut? If the barriers are not 
to apply to all races and peoples alike, on what prin- 
ciple should the discrimination be based? 


QUOTATIONS 


Migration in general may be described as a natural func- 
tion of social development. It has taken place at all times 
and in the greatest variety of circumstances. It has been 
tribal, national, class and individual. Its causes have been 
political, economic, religious, or mere love of adventure. 
Its causes and results are fundamental for the study of 
ethnology (formation and mixture of races), of political 
and social history, formation of states and survival of insti- 
tutions), and of political economy (mobility of labor and 
utilization of productive forces). Under the form of con- 
quest it makes the grand epochs in history (e. g., the fall of 
the Roman Empire) ; under the form of colonization it has 
transformed the world (eé. g., the settlement of America) ; 
under free initiative it is the most powerful factor in 
social adjustment (e. g., the growth of urban population) — 
“Migration,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 
Volume XVIII, p. 428.1 


To arrive at sound conclusions about the future it is neces- 
sary to know what has hitherto made people emigrate. With 
forced movements such as the slave trade we need not con- 
cern ourselves, for they have gone forever, and the deporta- 
tion of undesirables is also a thing of the past. The causes 
of voluntary migration are many, but there have at all 
times been two main considerations, the position at home 
and the prospect abroad. Sometimes the latter has been 
such as to allure even people who have nothing to com- 
plain of in their own country. This happened when gold 
was discovered in California in 1849, in Australia in 1861, 
and on the South African Rand in the ’eighties. And a 
mere desire to rise in life or a taste for adventure has often 
been enough to take a man abroad, for emigration is one of 
the forms which the surplus energy of a virile race is always 
apt to take. On the other hand, pressure at home has 


1 The whole article is of importance for this chapter. 


32 Missions and World Problems 


sometimes been sufficient by itself to compel a leap in the 
dark. In ancient times a series of tribal movements would 
be started by some obscure people outgrowing its means of 
subsistence far away in the hinterland. But as a rule both 
considerations have influenced the emigrant at the same 
time, and they generally react upon each other, for when the 
outlook is gloomy at home, there is always a tendency to 
idealize what is remote, just as nothing puts people more 
out of conceit with their surroundings than dreams of a 
far-off promised land. 

And the pinch at home has itself taken many forms. 
Conscience, political sentiment, tyranny, the restlessness 
left by war, all have played their part as well as economic 
pressure.—The Round Table, March, 1921, pp. 250, 251. 


The White Race is everywhere, by its popular voice and 
popular action, claiming and asserting its own right to be 
racially segregated in every respect from the non-European 
Races. Such complete racial segregation is incompatible 
with the idea of membership in one body and mutual sharing 
of a common life.... 

There is a profound dislike of Indians by the White Race 
in the Colonies, and an equally profound distrust. From all 
the self-governing Dominions Indians are excluded as resi- 
dents and citizens. South Africa and Australia are 
markedly sending invitations at the present time to Eng- 
lishmen, who have spent their lives in India, as desirable 
colonists and citizens; but if any of these Englishmen wished 
to take an Indian friend to reside with him, he would be 
refused. Even in England itself there have been signs of 
increasing color prejudice against the very few Indians who 
go over there for study. What is, perhaps, the most glaring 
example of dislocation is in the tropical areas of Northern 
Australia, which are almost uninhabited and separated 
from the south by a desert. These tropical areas are strictly 
prohibited to any one who is not a European even though 
he may belong, by birth, to the so-called British Common- 
wealth. A Greek or an Italian may enter,—and efforts 
are made to get such emigrants from Southern Europe,— 
but Indians, who are called “fellow citizens of the Empire,” 
are excluded. To speak of equal status under such condi- 
tions is absurd. 

Everywhere, throughout the British Empire, the White 
Race is dominant. Everywhere the White Race has its own 


The Migration of Peoples — 33 


privileged position. Everywhere the members of the White 
Race can appeal successfully for special rights and sanc- 
tions. Everywhere, in spite of the Reciprocity Agreement, 
the White Race has still the absolute power of immigration 
freely accorded. Meanwhile, side by side with this special 
position of privilege allowed everywhere to the White Race, 
the policy of segregation is being relentlessly carried out 
against the Indian. Insults are daily heaped upon those 
Indians who have gone abroad and become domiciled in the 
Colonies. For the most part, they are treated with hatred 
and contempt by the white colonial residents. This hatred 
and contempt shows every sign, in certain areas, of becoming 
a fanatical religion —C. F’. Andrews, “Christ and Labour,” 
pp. 92-94. 


A country which is as large as Europe minus Russia, 
which contains one-fifth of the total population of the world, 
and whose 350 millions are divided by race, caste, language 
and religion, is not to be easily known. Those who are in 
touch only with the Government in city centres or with com- 
merce may forget how largely India is rural. Ninety per 
cent. of the population, indeed, live in villages, of which 
there are 700,000. We can get a little idea of what this 
means if we calculate that if we were to visit one village a 
day it would take us 1,918 years to go through them all. 
There are only twenty-nine cities of over 100,000 inhabitants. 
This fact means that there is a terrific pressure of the people 
on the land, so that the cry in India is “to the towns” 
rather than “back to the land.” This pressure is practically 
relieved by emigration (é. g., to Burma, Fiji, Africa), and 
by seeking labor in the tea-gardens or in the towns and 
rising industrial centres.—Miss M. M. Allan, “Village Edu- 
cation in India,” in “Christian Education in Africa and the 
East,” pp. 41, 42. 


Here in the Old World it is centuries since our popula- 
tions reached comparatively fixed conditions. Our num- 
bers may wax or wane, but permanent immigration is a rela- 
tively small factor, and to most of us assimilation is only a 
name. We are more concerned about an outlet for our own 
people when times are bad. But in the new world the immi- 
gration problem occupies a very different place, thanks to 
the uneven way in which the inhabitants of our globe are 
distributed. If, indeed, a Martian were to approach it from 


34 Missions and World Problems 


the air the contrast between countries black with people and 
those whose virgin solitude is almost unbroken would strike 
him before anything else. There are districts in Europe in 
which there are more than 600 people to the square mile. 
The British Empire itself comprises the best of the unpeopled 
parts of the earth, and yet the bulk of its white inhabi- 
tants are still concentrated in a couple of small islands in 
the North Sea. In Great Britain alone there are nearly 
360 people to the square mile, while in Australia and 
Canada, though allowance must be made for large barren 
tracts, there are less than three. 

The problem is not, however, simply how to transport 
people from countries which have too many to those who 
have too few. For one thing, even under the most favorable 
circumstances, the latter can only absorb a certain number 
at a time, and the rate varies with their respective condi- 
tions, which themselves are constantly changing and often 
already as complex as those of the Old World. There are, 
moreover, elements which cannot from their nature be 
absorbed at all. The qualities that immigrants are bring- 
ing to their adopted countries today are, indeed, of supreme 
importance, for their children will be the great nations of 
tomorrow; and it is as true of a people as of an individual 
that the child is father of the man. The future of the world 
itself lagely depends upon these third-class ocean passengers. 
To attempt to consider the emigration question in compart- 
ments would be useless, for it is bound up with cosmic prob- 
lems whose roots intertwine far below the surface, and they 
affect every people—TZhe Round Table, March, 1921, pp. 241, 
242, 


For long centuries the white man with his more advanced 
civilization, his greater economic progress, and his superior 
implements of force, has forged his way into almost every 
country of the world in order that he might exploit the 
wealth of these countries, which so often have lain dormant 
at the feet of a less aggressive and less greedy people. 
Inch by inch the white man drove the red man back in 
America, and, it must be confessed, often with a red handed 
cruelty and a rank injustice which will ever remain a blot 
on the pages of history. He has held sway for many decades 
over the three hundred million brown men of India, he 
almost completely controls the destinies of the one hundred 
and forty or more millions of Africa. Even the teeming 


The Migration of Peoples 35 


millions of Eastern Asia are not free from his dominance. 
The white man is a world conquering and world dominat- 
ing species, restless of all barriers, and eager for new con- 
quests always. His early ancestors came out of central Asia 
and soon overran and conquered all Europe; from thence 
he has gone out to subjugate the whole world. Although 
the white races are outnumbered two to one by the colored 
races, the white man controls a large part of the world’s 
area. Of this the colored races are increasingly impatient, 
and either a new era of understanding must come or else 
the white races will ultimately find themselves overwhelmed. 
This is the deliberate conclusion of numerous students of 
the question. 

But not only has the white man assumed dominance of 
the lands of other races; he has now begun to draw a circle 
around his own possessions and exclude all aliens from the 
same. This again is largely economic in nature. The col- 
ored races have long lived in a much lower economic state 
than has he, and hence they are able to underbid him in 
the economic market of labor. As in the realm of money, 
a cheap coin runs out a good coin, so in the realm of labor 
a cheap man will underbid and run out the man who must 
have a larger wage to subsist. On this basis Australia 
excludes Orientals from her northern borders, California 
excludes Japanese, the laborers of eastern America clamor 
for the exclusion of the cheap laborers of southern Europe, 
and Stoddard thinks the opening up of white lands to 
colored races will be at the peril of exterminating the white 
race. “A struggle has begun,” says Weale, “between the 
white man and all the other men of the world to decide 
whether non-white men—that is yellow men, or brown men, 
or black men—may or may not invade the white man’s coun- 
tries in order there to gain their livelihood.”—W. D. 
Weatherford, “The Negro from Africa to America,” pp. 
uot ae 


During the recent past the European countries, under 
intense industrial development, have been responsible for the 
huge expansion of the world’s population. Internal pressure 
has caused them to seek an outlet for the overflow, and the 
rest of the earth has been exploited and used as a dump- 
ing ground for the surplus. Only a limited portion of the 
earth, however, has proved suitable for the transplanted 
European as a permanent home; and the temperate zones of 


36 Missions and World Problems 


both hemispheres have shown, in consequence, the greatest 
power of absorption. The emigrating peoples have not taken 
kindly either to the tropics or to the colder latitudes where 
empty spaces are available. The relief afforded the older 
countries by extensive emigration of their people has 
resulted in an acceleration of increase at home. The new 
occupants of the lands overseas also increase at a greater 
rate than they did at home, and the difficulty remains only 
temporarily solved. Moreover, after a time, the new states 
established overseas begin to feel that their own rate of 
increase gives them power to develop their territories inde- 
pendently, without further accessions of population from the 
home lands. This is the growing attitude of the United 
States at the present time. To be sure, Canada, Argentina, 
South Africa, and New Zealand still give a warm welcome to 
the immigrant and would not assent to my statement; but 
the attitude of labor in Australia towards immigration is 
somewhat hostile, and the phases through which the United 
States has passed may be taken as a gauge of the course of 
events in all the newer lands. When the pressure is really 
felt in these lands it will enforce an expansion into lati- 
tudes which have so far been shunned. In the southern 
hemisphere, except to a limited extent in Argentina, people 
will be forced by geographical conditions to expand into 
the tropics.—Geographical Review, October, 1921, p. 565. 


The great objection to the admission of Asiatics into Aus- 
tralia is that their standard of living is so enormously 
lower than that of the white men, their industry so great, 
their hours of work so long, and their numbers so vast, 
that they would inevitably in no long time bring down enor- 
mously the rate of wages and throw the white man out of 
work unless he adopted their standard of living and gave up 
all his leisure. It is true that for certain kinds of work 
the white man, if he kept sober, would probably command 
higher wages, but, on the other hand, in unskilled labor he 
cannot compete with the slow but late and early working 
Asiatic, while even in highly skilled labor the Chinaman, 
for instance, will do nearly as much work, will do it nearly 
if not quite as well, has no nerves, and is never off duty. 

Now Australia has, thanks in large measure to the Labor 
Party, slowly and painfully built up a condition of things 
in which, while there are few very rich men, the wealth, 
comfort, and leisure of the average man, including every 


The Migration of Peoples 37 


class of labor, is far in advance of any other country. There 
is practically no poverty, there need be no poverty were it 
not for the £20,000,000 that the five million people of Aus- 
tralia annually spend in drink. Now to have made it pos- 
sible for every person to be free from poverty, even if all 
are through their own fault not so free, is a great achieve- 
ment; to have secured that no man or woman shall have to 
work more than eight hours a day, unless they have the mis- 
fortune to be brain workers, is a great achievement; to have 
secured that no one shall starve or go into a workhouse in 
old age is a great achievement; to have secured by educa- 
tion and freedom of political opportunity that every man 
shall have an equal chance of self-advancement is no small 
achievement; and the average Australian sees very clearly 
that colored labor means destruction of all these hardly 
gained rights and privileges. It means that a few will become 
rich at the expense of the many. It means that wages will 
drop enormously without a corresponding fall in prices. It 
means that his leisure will be gone and that an element 
of fierce and deadly competition will enter into his life. 
It means that henceforth he will have to work, like the 
Asiatic, solely to live, and that art, literature, and recre- 
ation must disappear out of his life. 

He is perhaps inordinately proud of what he has done, and 
does not realize how he has been helped by fortune and 
nature, but for all that he can hardly be blamed for regard- 
ing the general life of Australia, with all its too little 
realized and availed of opportunities, as something higher 
and more valuable to the world than the fierce competitive 
struggle to live only of the Asiatic, and for feeling that the 
world would be the poorer if the white civilization were 
swallowed up in Australia, or if it became a country of 
great bosses, cheap colored labor, and mean whites. 

It is easy to see how such fears may at times express them- 
selves brutally and in exaggerated or ridiculous forms. 

I believe that White Australia is a justifiable policy if 
the Australian recognizes that he has a privileged position, 
not because he is inherently superior to all other men, but 
because the conditions of the country have been excep- 
tionally favorable for development along the lines he has 
adopted, and if he admits that he owes special duties to less 
fortunate peoples and especially to the less advanced colored 
races of the East. If he is not called upon to admit them 


388 Missions and World Problems 


to his country he is called upon to treat them with courtesy 
and justice and to give of his best to help in their uplift. If 
he believes in Christianity himself, he is surely especially 
bound to hand on the truth he believes to his more ignorant 
and less capable younger brethren.—The Right Rev. Gilbert 
White, “Thirty Years in Tropical Australia,” pp. 253-255. 


The subject of Chinese immigration into countries within 
the British Empire may be considered under two general 
aspects, namely, (1) immigration into temperate regions, 
where young and vigorous British communities have already 
settled; and (2) immigration into tropical areas, where the 
native population is either too small or too unsuited for 
modern economic develpment to meet the needs of capital- 
istic enterprise. 

During the last century the opening up of Canada, Aus- 
tralia, and New Zealand gave a stimulus to the speculative 
exportation of men by Chinese merchants—the conditions 
governing the development of the new countries and the 
discovery therein of rich gold fields promising a quick return 
for money invested in the traffic. As a result, the young 
British communities came to regard China as a source of 
whence there might pour forth into their midst a flood of 
immigrants, and therefore they secured themselves against 
the subversion of the body-politic that would follow a large 
movement outwards of the Chinese by adopting a policy of 
restriction which is practically one of prohibition. 

Although the right of these British communities to pre- 
serve the continuity of their social organization may be 
admitted, it is open to question whether a policy of mod- 
erate restriction would not be sufficient to achieve this end. 
But it is further argued by the British Dominions that a 
modified policy would encourage an alien system of debt 
bondage over which they can have no control. Such a sys- 
tem, it is believed, has led, and would again lead, to unfair 
economic competition with both wage-earning and merchant 
classes, the inevitable result being a lowering of the “stand- 
ard of life,” won by them after much strenuous endeavor. 
But as it becomes more apparent that the economic danger 
of Chinese immigration could be lessened by the efficient 
administration of necessary legislation, the emphasis in the 
argument against it is shifting from economics to eugenics. 
Chinese immigrants will be unwelcome to any British com- 
munity so long as they remain a group apart. But assimila- 


The Migration of Peoples 39 


tion almost inevitably means miscegenation, and against the 
latter there is a strong and widespread prejudice. Whether 
this prejudice is or is not well grounded is a subject for 
careful scientific investigation and not for argument. It 
is curious that the significance of the “race-question” for the 
immediate future has been so little appreciated in the past. 
Certainly from the data at present available no conclusion 
of any value can be drawn. But until it can be shown 
that miscegenation even on a small scale does not necessarily 
give rise to the evils generally ascribed to it, it is improb- 
able that even a moderate immigration of Chinese—or of 
other Asiatics—into the British Dominions will be allowed. 

The immigration of Chinese into the tropical British 
colonies—with the exception of the Straits Settlements, 
where the conditions of proximity and numbers favor the 
continuous coming and going of the Chinese—has resulted 
mainly from the institution of the indentured labor system. 
The story of the past makes it apparent that this system is 
subject to abuse. Moreover, when an effective opposition 
from either the native population or the governing authori- 
ties leads to a compulsory repatriation at the end of the 
period of service, the laborers under contract are removed 
for a period of years from a society to a labor system which 
prevents the satisfaction of normal human wants. It may 
be questioned whether, under such circumstances, the inden- 
tured labor system should be allowed to continue if the end 
to be attained through social organization is the welfare of 
man rather than the accumulation of “cities and money and 
rich plantations.”—Persia Crawford Campbell, “Chinese 
Coolie Emigration,” pp. 234, 235. 


The Japanese Exclusion Act was, in my judgment, an 
international disaster of the first magnitude—a disaster to 
American diplomacy in the Far East, a disaster to Ameri- 
can business, a disaster to religion and the effective work of 
our American Churches in Japan. 

Few Americans appreciate what happened, partly because 
they are not acquainted with Japan’s history of recent 
decades, partly because they fail to understand just what 
Japan’s contention really is, and partly because they are not 
personally familiar with the Japanese question in this coun- 
try. Sensational press reports coupled with mischievous 
politics have created mistaken ideas regarding the real issue. 


40 | Missions and World Problems 


The purpose of Congress was no doubt to stop further 
Japanese immigration, on the assumption that a flood of 
Japanese was still entering the United States. Congress 
could not have realized that Japan accepted the principle of 
exclusion in 1908, since which date the Japanese Govern- 
ment has been loyally cooperating with the Government of 
the United States in carrying out that policy. As a result 
of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, then entered into, more 
Japanese males have left the United States than have entered 
by 22,737. The coming of Japanese women to join their 
husbands or to be married to young men already here, per- 
mitted by the Agreement, has resulted in an increase of 
foreign born Japanese in Continental America during the 
sixteen years for which we have the figures (1909-1923) of 
only 8,681. 

Japan, moreover, has officially stated more than once that 
she was prepared to make the provisions of the Agreement 
even more rigid. She officially stated that the drastic restric- 
tion of immigation into America is a domestic matter con- 
cerning which she has nothing to say. 

It is, therefore, clear that what Congress wanted could 
have been secured with Japan’s cordial consent and cooper- 
ation. It is also clear that the issue in the mind of Japan. 
was not immigration but something else. 

From the standpoint of my special opportunities of knowl- 
edge, I wish to state with utmost clearness and emphasis 
that what Japan resented was not exclusion but humiliating 
race discrimination. And the tragedy lies in the fact that 
Congress could have secured what it felt needful and yet 
have secured it in a way that would have avoided affront- 
ing Japan; would have preserved the historic friendship 
and promoted the practice of cooperation in dealing with 
this and with every difficult issue in the problems of the 
Far East. 

Without one compensating advantage Congress has thrown 
away one of the most important American assets in solv- 
ing the problems of the Pacific and has, at the same time, 
created utterly needless feelings of mortification, humilia- 
tion and distrust, with fresh and as yet unknowable poten- 
tial factors of difficulty in maintaining the permanent peace 
of the Far East.—Letter from the Hon. Cyrus E. Woods, 
former U. S. Ambassador to Japan, to Dr. Robert E. Speer, 
and read at the meeting of the Federal Council of Churches 


The Migration of Peoples 41 


of Christ in America at the annual meeting of the Council in 
Atlanta, Ga., November, 1924. 


The Asiatic would put his case thus: “. . . You can use 
us when you want us to lay down our lives to defend you. 
We can enter your territories then. You even draw us in, as 
you have done in Fiji and Africa, when you want cheap 
labor. But you try to exclude us from political life and 
from holding land in your territory, in your cities, and on 
your farms. We cannot be content to be your tool forever. 
Self-determination is our motto as it is yours. You pene- 
trate our shores; why should we not penetrate yours? If 
you exclude us from yours, we will exclude you from ours. 
You say yours is the higher civilization; has that been dem- 
onstrated ?’—Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” pp. 
52, 53. 


The reason why the American missionary has become a 
particular object of criticism and antipathy in the estima- 
tion of the thoughtless public is the simple fact that he is 
understood to be a messenger of peace and goodwill, a 
preacher of righteousness and love and the essential equality 
and brotherhood of all mankind. But this act of his own 
Congress [Japanese Exclusion Clause in the Immigration 
Act] and the manner in which the law was enacted seem 
quite inconsistent and incongruous with the principles 
which he stands for. We know well enough that the mis- 
sionaries are not responsible for the laws which their Con- 
gress makes, but the man in the street does not discriminate 
and consequently the missionary suffers. Until this law is 
repealed or some satisfactory treaty is made between the 
two countries, the American missionary will find himself 
in an embarrassing position when he opens his mouth in 
defense of humanity and justice or in condemnation of 
international wrong or injustice. 

But the American missionaries are by no means the only 
group who suffer by this act of the American Congress; 
all Japanese churches, schools, colleges and universities and 
other Christian organizations and agencies financially sup- 
ported by American churches or other bodies will more or 
less suffer. They are in danger of being misunderstood as 
American institutions supported with the object of promot- 
ing American interests in Japan. They are in danger of 
being branded as un-Japanese and unpatriotic. 


42 Missions and World Problems 


There is another group of Japanese upon whom this act 
of the American Congress inflicts a severe blow. I refer 
to the small group of men like Viscounts Shibusawa and 
Kaneko and Baron Sakatani, who are life-long friends of 
America and have done everything in their power to pro- 
mote better understanding and friendship between the two 
countries. All their endeavors along this line in the past 
seem for the moment to have been rendered useless. Per- 
haps nobody can realize how deeply disappointed and pos- 
sibly humiliated they are.—Kajinosuke Ibuka, Japan Evan- 
gelist, June, 1924, pp. 36, 37. 


Once Congress intervened in Far Eastern affairs and 
seized the initiative. The Asiatic immigration policy 
belongs to Congress and arose directly out of the people 
who were being touched on the bare nerve of their indus- 
trial and social life. Congress steadily forced the hand of 
the Presidents and of the Secretaries of State. This policy 
formed the only really national item in our relations with 
the Far East for it was the only one which was adopted 
after full discussion and investigation in Congress. Unques- 
tionably it represented the will of the people. But it is 
significant that the question was discussed as a purely 
domestic issue and was settled in utter and brutal disregard 
for foreign relations and existing treaties. The settlement 
of this question is an illustration that the American system 
of government presents no insuperable obstacles to the con- 
trol of foreign policy by the people where the economic and 
social interest is sufficient, and is also a warning that other 
items of foreign policy are liable to initiation or revision 
by similar measures. That the American people are 
prone to resolve all questions into partisan and domestic 
issues and are deficient in a sense of cooperative responsi- 
bility in international affairs is evident. This fact becomes 
somewhat disquieting when one turns to the political situa- 
tion in the Far East and notes how necessary a coopera- 
tive policy has become.—Tyler Dennett, “Americans in 
Eastern Asia,” pp. 676, 677. 


If we were to offer a symbol of what Harlem has come to 
mean in the short span of twenty years it would be another 
statue of liberty on the landward side of New York. It 
stands for a folk-movement which in human significance can 
be compared only with the pushing back of the western 


The Migration of Peoples 43 


frontier in the first half of the last century, or the waves of 
immigration which have swept in from overseas in the last 
half. Numerically far smaller than either of these move- 
ments, the volume of migration is such none the less that 
Harlem has become the greatest Negro community the world 
has known—without counterpart in the South or in Africa. 
But beyond this, Harlem represents the Negro’s latest thrust 
toward democracy. ... 

In final analysis, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort or 
colony, though it is in part all of them. It is—or promises 
at least to be—a race capital. Europe seething in a dozen 
centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a 
renascent Judaism—these are no more alive with the spirit 
of a racial awakening than Harlem; culturally and spir- 
itually it focuses a people. Negro life is not only founding 
new centers, but finding a new soul. The tide of Negro 
migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully 
explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war 
industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, 
or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social 
terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. 
Neither labor demand, the boll weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan 
is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them 
may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on 
the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained 
primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social 
and economic freedom, of a spirit to Seize, even in the face 
of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improve- 
ment of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the 
movement of the Negro migrant becomes more and more like 
that of the European waves at their crests, a mass of move- 
ment toward the larger and the more democratic chance— 
in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from country- 
side to city, but from medieval America to modern.—The 
Survey, March 1, 1925, pp. 629, 680. 


The closing of the doors of America to a mere crack has 
increased rather than diminished the importance of immigra- 
tion as an international problem. The urge to emigrate 
among European peoples is probably stronger to-day than at 
any time in the past one hundred years. The virtual elimina- 
tion of the principal outlet, as far as the majority of nations 
is concerned, has recast the problem in entirely new terms. 


44 Missions and World Problems 


Europe is being forced to give deliberate consideration to 
migration problems such as has never been called for previ- 
ously. Other nations on other continents must also recog- 
nize the grave potentialities of the situation. The United 
States will be looked to for suggestion and guidance growing 
out of its unique experience.—Henry Pratt Fairchild, “Immi- 
gration,” p. x. 


Tf transportation conditions and means of communication 
had remained as they were at the time of the Revolution, the 
present immigration situation could never have arisen. 
There would have been natural barriers which would have 
prevented too large increments of European population from 
entering the new countries while they were working out their 
problems and gradually finding themselves. The problems 
of immigration which presented themselves would have been 
of sufficiently moderate dimensions so that they could have 
been dealt with as they arose. As it is, the recent rapid 
development of communication has made the ease of immi- 
gration so great that the world has been nearly overwhelmed 
by the resulting problems. The movement of millions of peo- 
ple from one region to another is a phenomenon of prodigious 
sociological import. Modern mechanical progress made this 
movement possible, before the nations or the individuals con- 
cerned had advanced far enough in social science to know 
how to make the most of it. The problem is really a conserva- 
tion problem, the conservation of human and social values. 
The welfare of mankind is largely conditioned by the num- 
ber, density, and distribution of human, populations upon the 
earth’s surface. Until very recent times developments in 
these matters have taken place quite independently of any 
scientific analysis or rational control. When real research 
and reasoned programs began to be applied they were moti- 
vated primarily by nationalistic interests whereas the larg- 
est results can come only from an internationally inclusive 
analysis and interpretation.. Doubtless as a result of the 
absence of a guiding social science vast human resources 
have already been squandered, just as natural resources are 
always squandered when men attempt to exploit them for 
individual gain with no scientific direction and a decidedly 
short range vision. But there is still much to be saved. The 
advantages which accrued to mankind from the combination 
of the discovery of the New World and the Industrial and 


The Migration of Peoples 45 


Commercial Revolutions have not yet been entirely dis- 
sipated. There is a field for a true conservation policy. But 
it must be a genuine international policy worked out sym- 
pathetically and tolerantly among the peoples of the world, 
and based on scientifically determined data. And like every 
conservation policy it must involve restrictions on the free- 
dom of action of individuals—Henry Pratt Fairchild, 
“Immigration.” pp. 497, 498. 


CHAPTER III 


MISSIONS, WORLD HEALTH, AND SOCIAL REFORM 


QUESTIONS 


A. The Place of Educational and Medical Missions in the 
Fight for Health and Against Disease. 


ib; 


Is there a Christian obligation to maintain one’s own 
health? That of one’s family? That of one’s com- 
munity? Where does the obligation cease? What 
ways of serving the health of the community and of 
wider groups are open to the individual? What ways 
are open to Churches as such? 


. Just what interest has your community in the fact 


that the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 is supposed 
to have started in Western Asia? What kind of health 
conditions abroad and in what parts of the world most 
concern Americans? Why are Americans interested 
in health conditions in other parts of the world? 


. Would we be justified in sending and supporting edu- 


cational and medical workers abroad for reasons of 
enlightened national self-interest with respect to 
public health? If so, where should we send them? 


. Would the motive of national or personal self-inter- 


est be strong enough to keep these educators and 
physicians at their work? Would professional motives 
suffice? Does the aim of medical missions differ from 
that of such agencies as the International Health 
and Research Bureau of the League of Nations? If 
so, how? Considering the achievements and the re- 
sources of the Rockefeller Foundation and the China 
Medical Board, are the health activities of missions 
46 


Health and Social Reform 47 


rendered largely superfluous? What should be the 
relation of medical missions to such agencies? 


. If the missionary motive rather than that of self- 


interest is to prevail in our policy for sending out mis- 
sionaries, where would we wish them to put the main 
emphasis in their work so far as the problem of health 
is concerned? Why? 


. With respect to the needs of the backward portions of 


the world, so far as health promotion is concerned, 
what is the best way of bettering conditions? What 
can educational and medical missions contribute? 


. The Bearing on Missions of the World Fight Against 
Alcohol and Narcotics, Unwholesome Literature and Pic- 
tures, and the Traffic in Women and Children. 


Ls 


Is the use of opium increasing in the United States? 
In the Orient? What are the sources of the opium 
supply? Who conducts this trade? What bearing do 
such things as the trade in narcotics and alcohol, the 
traffic in women and children, the broadcasting of 
unwholesome literature and pictures, have on the con- 
structive work of missions? Where are missions most 
affected by these evils? 


. Do these evils have their rise primarily in so-called 


Christian lands or in mission lands? Are they to be 
dealt with at their sources or where they are actually 
in action and having their unhappy results? 


. Can international evils be dealt with apart from inter- 


national effort and cooperation? Should interna- 
tional effort be a cooperative endeavor between 
Christian organizations or between governments, or 
both? If both, what is the function of the Chris- 
tian organizations? What interest have they in the 
success of international effort between peoples, as in 
the League of Nations? Where does individual respon- 
sibility come in? 


48 


Missions and World Problems 


4. What can experiments at reform within a limited area 


contribute to the solution of the larger problems? 
What obligations rest upon the people of the coun- 
tries of production, such, for instance, as China, India, 
and Turkey, in the case of opium? What obligations 
rest upon the countries primarily involved in reaping 
commercial advantages from any sordid international 
traffic ? 


. What contribution, if any, can foreign missionaries 


make to social reform in the countries from which they 
go? Of what importance is it to them in their work 
that in the home-base lands these reform movements 
should be brought to success? What movements for 
social reform within the United States are of par- 
ticular significance to home mission workers? What 
contribution to the success of these movements can be 
made through united effort by the Churches? Should 
this effort be in the direction of promoting educational 
processes as a basis for independent thought and 
action on the part of church members, or should the 
Churches together seek to participate directly in 
reform movements? If the latter, how? What is the 
significance of the social purity, temperance, and kin- 
dred reform movements led by Christian nationals in 
Japan, India, and other lands? 


C. The Contribution of Missions Toward Developing an En- 
lightened Public Opinion Throughout the World. 


1B 


What part has the development of public opinion 
played in effecting changes of social habit with respect 
to drunkenness, rigidity of caste, child marriage, 
polygamy, prostitution, slavery? In helping to eradi- 
cate tuberculosis, smallpox, malaria? What is the 
relation of Christian life and thought to such move- 
ments ? 


. What part should missionaries take in the develop- 


Health and Social Reform 49 


ment of public opinion in the countries in which they 
give their life service? Should the missionaries seek 
only to develop Christian life and character, leaving 
opinion-making processes to their converts? Should 
the missionaries bring to bear upon public officials 
facts and social experience from other lands, or leave 
such activities to government and other secular 
agencies, national and international? 

. Should the missionaries seek to keep their own home- 
lands informed on matters of health and social reform 
where they are serving? What special facilities or 
equipment have either the missionaries or their sup- 
porters for stimulating public opinion in America or 
in mission lands on great social questions? 

4, What part should missionaries take in these great 
international movements toward reform and the pro- 
motion of social health? Would you like to see the 
missionaries give themselves largely to these move- 
ments? Should missions promote social reform as 
well as build character and develop spiritual life? 
Can missions do either without doing both? If not, 
where should the emphasis be put? 


oo 


QUOTATIONS 


The countries we usually speak of as non-Christian are 
the countries which form the great reservoirs of epidemic 
disease—as in plague, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, typhus 
fever, smallpox and the parasitic intestinal diseases. So our 
efforts toward control of these diseases are not limited in 
their benefits to the countries where the efforts are put forth, 
but all the world is directly benefited by the elimination of 
chances of infection in each of these diseases. 

Take for instance the plague. There have been for ages 
four centers where the fire of plague has smouldered, occa- 
sionally breaking forth in great conflagrations. One center 
is on the eastern slope of the Himalayas from which the 
great Hongkong epidemic in 1894 came. The western slope 
of these same mountains has another center, probably con- 


50 Missions and World Problems 


nected with the first. This was the source of the Bombay 
epidemic in 1896 and the disease is still left in Bombay. 
The third source of plague exists from about the center of 
Arabia to Mesopotamia. From this area the Black Sea and 
Persia were infected. The fourth great epidemic area is in 
the interior of Africa, near the source of the White Nile in 
Uganda. Each center is the very heart of a non-Christian 
country. The havoc wrought by plague is hardly to be com- 
prehended in complacent America. Its inroads in India 
alone since 1892 have been terrible. In 1907 over one mil- 
lion persons died of plague in that country. In the winter 
of 1910-11 one of the most virulent epidemics of modern 
times occurred in Manchuria, the mortality being over 90 
per cent of those sick with the disease. 

Carefully planned preventive measures organized and 
backed adequately have demonstrated the possibility of 
exterminating plague in these very countries where it is 
most common. The efforts of the United States against 
plague in Manila have been so successful that plague has 
disappeared in that city. There is no good reason why we 
might not apply similar methods of proved success in these 
smouldering centers and save untold and uncounted deaths 
in the future from a preventable disease. 

Smallpox is a disease against which sanitation—that is 
improved living conditions—has no power at all, but against 
which, fortunately, we have an almost perfect preventive 
measure. The present century in America has no concept 
of the ravages of this disease which occurred here a hundred 
or more years ago. Reliable data available indicates that 
during twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, fifteen 
million persons died of the disease. Campaigns for educa- 
tion of the public, where smallpox is still a menace, in the 
effectiveness of vaccination can be conducted at a fraction 
of the cost of the ravages of the disease in one year. . 

Beyond and above these, a very great opportunity opens 
in expansion of our work to prevent infant mortality, infant 
blindness and the early acquiring of chronic disease. There 
are untouched fields of opportunity in tuberculosis, which 
we have always with us, in leprosy—again particularly 
common in non-Christian lands—in typhoid fever and typhus 
fever, in dysentery and the acute infections of childhood: 
in all these the application of modern methods is sorely 
needed to relieve in a measure the overwhelming load on 


Health and Social Reform 51 


the hospital equipment and the medical staffs. After all, 
if we live up to the tremendous opportunities in preventive 
measures ahead of us, we may find that experience gained 
abroad may be most useful here at home in combating some 
of these universal diseases, and this bread that we cast upon 
the waters will not fail to return to us in due season. Even 
from merely selfish motives we ought to go into this new 
work with a powerful emphasis. We have, to be sure, 
motives higher than selfish interest. We rely on the back- 
ground of the past with great faith in the future if we should 
be found faithful to our new obligation and opportunity— 
that all the world may indeed have Life more abundantly. 
—Reginald M. Atwater, Missionary Review of the World, 
October, 1919, pp. 751, 752. 


The action of the League of Nations at their first Assembly 
in voting a large sum of money with which to attack the 
problem of typhus in central Europe was not dictated by 
mere benevolence. It was sound economics, which recog- 
nized that it was unsafe to the rest of the world to allow 
so dangerous a plague-spot to be left unmolested. And the 
same is true of China. Everyone has been so preoccupied 
with the horrors of the Great War during these last years 
that but few have had time to contemplate the magnitude 
of the disaster which was wrought throughout the world 
by the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which actually 
“destroyed more lives in the whole world than did the 
European war in five years.” And but few have appre- 
ciated the significance of the fact that that appalling 
disaster, which produced widespread havoe in North Amer- 
ica, where it assumed a peculiarly virulent and fatal form, 
had traversed China before spreading across the Pacific. In 
this connection every student of bacteriology will remember 
the important scientific law which teaches us that the pas- 
sage of any infective organism through a host of low resist- 
ance increases the virulence of the germ. In these days of 
shortened communications it is hardly a matter of uncon- 
cern, in face of the possibility of such world-wide epidemics, 
whether the health and resistance of China is normal or sub- 
normal, 

But apart from all such questions any thought of refusing 
to make China healthier and happier strikes at the root of 
every conception of Christian brotherhood. We must help 
her in her fight for health if we are pretending to be Chris- 


52 Missions and World Problems 


tian at all; and to do this successfully it is not enough to 
content ourselves with opening up hospitals for the recep- 
tion of those already diseased; we must go deeper and try 
to assist her in the eradication of those very conditions 
which help to spread disease. 

For many years past the need of preventive medicine in 
China has been a matter upon which many medical mis- 
sionaries have felt urgently, and wherever large epidemics 
have broken out—cholera, plague, etec.—these men and 
women have usually been foremost in their efforts to organ- 
ize preventive measures.—Harold Balme, “China and Modern 
Medicine,” pp. 172-174. 


More and more, preventive medicine takes its place as the 
ally, or the advance guard of curative medicine; and the 
sphere of the former, if its work is to be effective, must be 
constantly enlarged. For the very success of the nineteenth 
century in improving and cheapening means of communica- 
tion made the great problem of health control an essen- 
tially international one, since it caused the carrying of 
disease from continent to continent with a rapidity unknown 
before. Of the dangers springing from this source a strik- 
ing example was the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which, 
according to a recent authoritative statement, was the direct 
occasion of more deaths than took place on all the battle 
fronts in over four years of war. Thus, if the League 
[of Nations] rises to the height of its opportunity in this 
section of its work, medical missions will find themselves 
powerfully reinforced in their work of combating disease. 
For the proportion of the population of any country directly 
benefited by the work of mission hospitals must as a rule 
be small. As centres of light and knowledge, they have a 
value far beyond their actual magnitude; yet their work 
must in the main be curative, and only incidentally pre- 
ventive. Thus the work of the medical missionary will be 
made at once easier and more fruitful if the government of 
the territory in which he works takes measures, indicated 
by the International Health and Research Bureau of the 
League, for the prevention of disease and the promotion of 
habits and surroundings which tend to health.—G. F. Bar- 
bour, International Review of Missions, July, 1920, p. 364. 


Medical missions have not lost in the least degree their 
original aim and purpose. They represent the compas- 


Health and Social Reform 53 


sionate Christ yearning over the suffering masses of His 
ignorant children, to whom He stretches out His hands in 
loving invitation. At the same time they are introducing 
among the people of the East a new profession, are making 
the modern medical school and hospital indigenous to the 
Orient, and are constructing barriers through which the epi- 
demics and scourges that seem to breed in those countries 
may not break. This movement, steadily increasing in area 
and force, must eventuate even in the elimination of the 
breeding grounds themselves.—James L. Barton, “Human 
Progress Througa Missions,” p. 67. 


The crux of the opium trade lies in the Far East. For 
over a century cvium has been used as a money-getter to 
swell the revenues of certain European countries with pos- 
sessions in the Orient. Individuals have grown rich on the 
proceeds. Colonies have prospered. Labor, the cheap and 
plentiful labor of China, has been lured by opium to certair 
colonies where native labor is not obtainable; and however 
individuals were damaged by this policy of wanton disregard 
for their welfare, there were always more, by the million, 
to draw upon. Human life has been utterly disregarded. 
Considerations of public health, of building up a stable, 
sober community, have never entered in. Nothing is so 
cheap as human life in the Orient, nothing so easily replace- 
able. And opium has been called upon to waste this human 
life, by destroying its value and efficiency, in order that 
Europeans might prosper. 

This, then, is the real problem before us, the psychology 
of those nations that encourage the use of opium in their 
Oriental colonies, and are unmoved by the wastage of human 
life that this policy involves. They seek safety for them- 
selves, in their own countries, through prohibitive legisla- 
tion, although this safety is illusory. Little by little the 
consumption of prohibited drugs increases, and it will in 
time threaten the welfare of all countries. Yet these nations 
hesitate to cut down production, since this production—a 
large part of it—is for the Orient, where the traffic receives 
official sanction and support. How can we expect them to 
curb production for one half the world, when there is no 
desire to curb it for the other? We have seen enough of 
the harm done by drugs in America to make us realize the 
waste and destruction that are now going on in the 
Far East. And that waste must be stopped. The world 


54 Missions and World Problems 


cannot tolerate two standards as to the use of opium; one, 
that it is harmful for ourselves, and must be prevented 
from creeping in upon us; the other, that it is harmless for 
other, more helpless peoples, and can be fed to them by 
the ton. 

We can never fight the drug evil successfully while this 
double standard prevails. If opium is produced for the 
Orient, the overflow of that output must necessarily filter 
back into Europe and America. But the thing to be reck- 
oned with is the psychology of those nations that find 
opium harmless for certain peoples. We cannot cooperate 
with them or work in harmony with them while their point 
of view prevails. We must all think alike on this question. 
The fight against drugs calls for international cooperation, 
and that cooperation cannot be whole-hearted and sincere if 
certain nations are with us on one side of the globe and 
against us on another.... 

After all, the first step toward ending the drug traffic 
is to expose it, in all its sinister details and ramifications. 
Full exposure is needed as to the individuals and the nations 
that uphold and profit by it. Strong light must be let into 
dark places. The drug traffic has flourished in secret all 
these years because practically no one knew anything about 
it. This period of secrecy is now over.—Ellen N. LaMotte, 
“The Ethics of Opium,” pp. 12, 13, 14, 182, 183. 


It is only blind prejudice or unscientific partiality which 
could make one deny the various contributions, however 
limited they may be in scope, which Christianity has made 
towards the social progress of China in the last fifty years. 
The fight which Christians waged against the evil of opium 
is a notable one. The fact that the opium was introduced 
into China at the point of the bayonet by a Christian nation 
often overshadows the heroic fight Christians put up through 
all these years. The introduction of free medical service 
according to modern scientific practices has another notable 
record. One can mention other items which have directly 
or indirectly contributed to social progress or which have 
led others to work for that end. But these good works of 
Christians have been given very little proper recognition, 
simply because they were under Christian auspices; to the 
average mind it was taken as a necessary part of the scheme 
of propaganda. The real significance of social service as an 
expression of Christian faith and the real motive power 


Health and Social Reform 55 


which is behind all these Christian social services have not 
been properly understood. This movement [China’s Renais- 
sance] with its increasing emphasis upon social progress 
and humanitarianism has opened the eyes of the people to 
see the real value and proper motive of social service. The 
raison Wétre of various forms of Christian activities is grad- 
ually being understood and the simple notion of regarding 
all Christian social service as a mere scheme of propaganda 
with ulterior motives is gradually passing away.—Timothy 
Tingfang Lew, “China’s Renaissance,” in “China Today 
Through Chinese Eyes,” pp. 48-45. 


In every land the missionary has stood for enfranchise- 
ment. The mass movements in India have lifted the Chris- 
tian to such a level of independence that the non-Christians 
from the same divisions of the out-castes are following their 
example and asserting themselves politically in an entirely 
new way. The missionary has almost always been the cham- 
pion of the oppressed. He has sought to put an end to 
slavery, foot-binding in China, the caste system in India 
and the killing of unwanted girl babies, or, as in Africa, the 
murder of twins. The whole conception of womanhood takes 
a different level where Christianity can make itself heard.— 
Frank Lenwood, in C. O. P. E. C., Commission Reports, Vol. 
Ale pp eeh, 212, 


The Orient and the Occident are being drawn together by 
all the mechanical appliances of Western civilization. Tele- 
graphs and wireless, fast steamers, railways, and motor 
roads are annihilating distance and time. Outwardly the 
chief cities of the Orient have adopted or are adopting most 
of the material equipment of European cities. In many 
directions intellectual intercourse between the Occident and 
the Orient is increasing every day. In almost every oriental 
country there has grown up a western-educated class that 
can speak and read and write, sometimes quite admirably, 
one or other of our Western languages, more especially Eng- 
lish. There are judges and lawyers, doctors and engineers, 
men of letters and men of science, capable of competing in 
their own field with the men of the Occident who have been 
their teachers. The textbooks in schools and colleges are for 
the most part borrowed from the Occident, and it is to occi- 
dental research that the Orient owes even its much larger 
knowledge today of its own past history. 


56 Missions and World Problems 


Many Orientals have been brought up almost exclusively 
on occidental literature of which at first at any rate they 
preferred the best. Today unfortunately the popular book- 
stalls of the Orient are littered with its worst, often in 
vernacular translations, just as cinemas generally parade 
the worst possible pictures of occidental life. The influence 
of the press, itself an entirely modern production imported 
from the Occident, has become ubiquitous. In India many 
of the leading newspapers, owned and edited by Indians, are 
written and published in English, though the reverse of 
English in spirit and tone, and give the cue to innumerable 
vernacular newspapers far more crude and violent. Under 
the stimulus of the Occident, the Orient is learning to 
develop its immense resources, and the markets of the Orient, 
more and more closely linked up in trade and industry and 
finance with those of the Occident, respond automatically to 
every wave of prosperity and depression that beats upon 
them from London or Paris or New York. 

Western education has been for the Orient the tree of 
knowledge of good and evil. Whether the good shall pre- 
vail over the evil constitutes the supreme test to which the 
civilization of the Occident as a whole—the civilization that 
is as much that of America as of Europe—is being subjected 
today throughout the Orient. It is not merely or mainly 
the political ascendancy of any one European power over 
these or those peoples of the Orient that is at stake. It is 
not merely or mainly whether President Wilson’s formula 
of “self-determination” is, or was intended to be, applicable 
to the nations of the Orient whose independence might very 
well mean merely a reversion to oriental forms of society 
and government entirely incompatible with any fruitful rela- 
tions with the Occident. The fundamental issue is whether 
the Orient can be brought to adapt itself to that democratic 
type of human society which the most progressive nations 
of the Occident have gradually evolved as affording the 
largest opportunities for individual and collective freedom 
combined with the restraining sense of individual and collec- 
tive responsibility. 

If one seeks to define what the Orient chiefly lacks, and 
has always lacked, it is the practice of freedom with the 
sense of responsibility, or, in one word, character. Almost 
the only forms of government it has ever known have been 
theocracy and autocracy with alternating periods of license 


Health and Social Reform 57 


and anarchy.—Sir Valentine Chirol, “The Occident and the 
Orient,” pp. 205-207. 


Historically, the Christian missionary movement, not- 
withstanding its failures, mistakes and shortcomings, has 
been one of the chief forces in bringing about understanding 
between different races. It has helped to reveal to Asiatic 
and African peoples the higher side of western civilization. 
While it has not wholly escaped the contagion of the im- 
perialistic and crusading temper, it has in contrast with the 
egoistic impulses and aims of western nations exhibited an 
unselfish desire to help and serve. Mission hospitals have 
furnished a signal example of Christian charity. Christian 
missions have made notable contributions to the education 
of the peoples of Asia; in the African continent, excepting 
the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, practically all 
the education that the native populations have had they have 
received in missionary schools. In hundreds of Christian 
schools and colleges in both continents western teachers have 
come into intimate relations with their pupils of other races 
and formed bonds of friendship which have lasted through 
life. Missionaries have made large contributions to western 
knowledge of the languages, thought and customs of other 
peoples. Through missionary work hundreds of thousands 
of individuals belonging to other races have come to know 
personally white men whom they can trust.—J. H. Oldham, 
“Christianity and the Race Problem,” p. 247. 


The responsibilities of trusteeship are not fully discharged 
in securing to the native population immunity from injus- 
tice and exploitation. The material and moral advancement 
of the people must be furthered by positive measures. A 
constructive policy of education is required. Its aims must 
be far wider than the provision of clerks for government 
offices and mechanics for the railways and public works. It 
must include measures for elevating the life of the com- 
munity through the improvement of agriculture, the devel- 
opment of native industries, the promotion of health, the 
training of the people in the management of their own affairs 
and the inculeation of true ideals of citizenship and of 
service of the community. Above all it must aim at pro- 
viding the people with capable, well-trained and trust- 
worthy leaders of their own race. 

It is in this task of education that the European govern- 


58 Missions and World Problems 


ments in Africa have most come short. The field of educa- 
tion has been left too exclusively to Christian missions, 
whose limited resources are insufficient to cope with the mag- 
nitude of the undertaking. Their contribution has been, and 
will continue to be, of the highest value. But the time has 
come when the work of education must be conceived in a 
larger way and taken in hand with fresh vigor.—J. H. Old- 
ham, “Christianity and the Race Problem,” pp. 104, 105. 


One of the greatest evils of the present time is the so- 
called ‘‘white slave traffic’; that is, the enticement of women 
and girls from their own country to another for immoral 
purposes. The nations of the world, in their present state 
of isolation and lack of coordinated police functions, have ° 
found this evil almost impossible to suppress, and they have 
been compelled to attack the problem through international 
conferences and by international cooperation.—Oscar New- 
fang, “The Road to World Peace,” p. 79. 


In regions where forced labor is in practice, the mis- 
sionary is at his wits’ end to know where lies the path of 
duty and privilege. He is the guest of the country. If his 
presence is obnoxious to the authorities he may be ordered 
to leave. May he, while enjoying this privilege, make public 
attacks upon the acts of the government or upon the negli- 
gence of the government in executing its own law? This 
question has a far wider application than the slave trade in 
Africa. It applies to the persecuting of the minority popula- 
tions in Turkey and Persia, to the treatment of the Koreans 
by the Japanese, industrial problems in China, the judicial 
examination of prisoners by torture, cruelties practiced 
upon prisoners, and religious persecution in general. Shall 
the missionary act as a critic of the government and of 
local officials? There can be little question that if mis- 
sionaries assume an attitude of public criticism they will 
make themselves persona non grata to the officials and 
weaken if not completely destroy their influence over them. 
They may even greatly aggravate, as has happened in some- 
what similar cases in the past, the very cause they desire 
to aid. 

Again attention must be called to the fact that the mis- 
sionary does not go out as a public reformer. He is a 
preacher of righteousness, but he has no authority or power 
to enforce it. He may remonstrate with local officials and 


Health and Social Reform 59 


magistrates, but he cannot compel them to accept his advice. 
If he interferes in administrative matters, he may make a 
bad situation worse and cause his own removal from the 
country. 

Quite aside from the possible effect of such action upon 
himself, the missionary must not for the sake of the cause 
lose sight of his commission. He preaches the gospel of 
reform, but does not himself institute the reform. The seed 
he sows must bear fruit in due time from the soil of the 
country. It cannot be forced. The process will necessarily 
be slow. Cruelties and injustices will be practiced yet for 
generations. The missionary represents the voice crying in 
the wilderness of hatred, greed, cruelty, injustice and 
unrighteousness. He has no power to execute the gospel. 
The power of God unto salvation alone can achieve the 
results.—James L. Barton, International Review of Missions, 
July, 1924, pp. 354, 355. 


The changes wrought in India through missionary impulse 
in the sphere of social and religious life since Carey’s day 
have been nothing short of marvelous. Evil customs which 
then shocked the Western world have been banned, and the 
public opinion and practice in regard to such matters as 
polygamy, child marriage, widow re-marriage, temple pros- 
titution, rigidity of caste, etc., have shown amazing advance. 
A great and powerful social propaganda is led by able 
Indians, one of the most brilliant of whom, Sir Narayan 
Chandavarkar of Bombay, said, “The ideas that lie at the 
heart of the Gospel of Christ are slowly but surely per- 
meating every part of Hindu society, and modifying every 
phase of Hindu thought.” .. . Such a result is magnifi- 
cent justification of those early missionaries who risked 
danger and obloquy in their fight against cruel and selfish 
customs; who preferred to close their schools rather than 
deny the right of the low-caste pupil to sit beside the Brah- 
min; and who, seeing the visage of Christ stamped on the 
face of the “untouchables” stooped down to raise them to a 
high estate—Rev. J. H. Graham, “Industrial and Social 
Methods,” in “The Vision of the Kingdom,” Report of the 
Missionary Congress of the Scottish Churches, Glasgow, 
1922, pp. 73, 74. 


All who know Africa best agree that the only hope for 
the people lies in finding a new spiritual foundation for 


60 Missions and World Problems 


their individual and tribal life. The old moralities were 
poor enough in all conscience, often terrible beyond words, 
but there was something good in them, some spiritual loy- 
alty or influence which helped to keep men from going to 
the very worst. Today that spiritual base for such morality 
as existed is gone; and a dangerous transition stage, in 
which negations rule, has come. Not, in the main, let it be 
said again, through Christian missions, but through the 
inrushing flood of Western civilization with all its accom- 
paniments, good and bad. “What is effecting the most pro- 
found change in the native,” writes Maurice Evans in his 
able book, ‘Black and White in South Africa,’ “is his con- 
tact with the white man at all points, and this change is 
proceeding with ever accelerated speed. The fundamental 
differences between these changes, and those wrought by the 
missionaries, are that, in the former there is little building 
up of any salutary infiuence to take the place of the old 
wholesome restraints, whilst in the latter religion and 
morality are inculcated, and replace the checks weakened 
or destroyed.” 

No more convincing evidence of the soundness of the above 
statement could be adduced, than the fact that the judgment 
which it passes on Christian missions has been completely 
endorsed by the South African Government. Of all the Afri- 
can governments this is the government with the longest 
experience of the African. In the past its record in respect 
to him has often been sadly and darkly stained, but today 
it is awake as never before to its own duties, and to the 
African’s rights. It notes with anxiety the disruptive pro- 
cess in native life, it seeks the remedy and it finds it—in 
the work of Christian Missions! Education the African of 
today will have. Religion he must have. Christian mis- 
sions supply both, and in them lies Africa’s best hope.— 
J. N. Ogilvie, “Our Empire’s Debt to Missions,” pp. 198, 199. 


The old idea that missionaries should concern themselves 
only with the spiritual condition of their converts is passing 
or has passed. Educational, industrial and medical work, 
and other branches of indirect missionary effort, have proved 
of such value that none now would attempt to deny them a 
place within the mission sphere. But there are still some 
who shrink from widening the scope of a missionary’s work 
still further, and who would bid us beware of taking part 
in any social reform, political or national movements. 


Health and Social Reform 61 


While, however, we may be aware of the necessity of caution 
in our approach to these subjects, we who are working in 
India cannot escape from our responsibilities. We are 
forced to consider what our attitude should be with regard 
to these movements, and such consideration forces us to the 
conclusion that a just measure of responsibility has been 
evaded in the past——Dora Tickell, The Hast and the West, 
January, 1920, p. 79. 


In America during the last six decades ethics and morality 
have been unable to keep pace with the rapid developments 
in commerce, business and industry. Untold evils, hereto- 
fore unthought of, arose as a result of maladjustment to 
these new conditions of social life. During the next six 
decades in China there is every reason to expect a develop- 
ment more or less similar. Not only will it be one of material 
civilization, but with it the influx of new ideas will become 
correspondingly great. A condition of maladjustment to 
these new and changing situations will probably be many 
times worse, because, with the shelling off of old traditional 
restraints, the very social order itself will be in danger of 
cracking under the tremendous strain. The indigenous 
restraints and moral controls have served China well for cen- 
turies under conditions of isolation. But in the new age of 
progress a new set of adequate and vital controls must be 
discovered and set up or demoralization of society and race 
degeneration will inevitably result. Indeed many evidences 
indicate that this process has already begun. Christianity, 
being fundamentally social and concerned with all phases of 
individual and social life, and being essentially progressive 
and furnishing the dynamic of true progress, can contribute 
to Chinese society the very ideals and standards necessary 
as controls under these new conditions of social living.— 
Daniel H. Kulp, Chinese Recorder, February, 1919, pp. 
93, 94. 


Progress was registered last year in preparing the ground 
for the setting up of a Christian social order in China where- 
in human life and dignity will be given their Chris- 
tian values. That this effort should be made was another 
mandate given by the Christians in China as speaking 
through the National Christian Conference. The year has 
been spent mainly in trying to find the approach that will 
fit the situation in China. The number of places with defi- 


62 Missions and World Problems 


nite organization for study of industrial conditions has 
increased. Even disturbed Szechwan finds time for it. 
Considerable material to direct study of the present order 
is under way. A cabinet of six, with the resident secretary 
of the National Christian Council as corresponding secre- 
tary, is giving time to rendering such assistance as is called 
for. This cabinet is getting into touch with the Interna- 
tional Labor Office. This is a link of far-reaching import. 
The Christian forces through the National Christian Council 
are quietly assuming leadership in this movement. An 
attempt to understand the makeshifts of the present order 
took place in Shantung Christian University which might 
well be copied elsewhere. There a group of students went 
out and studied direct the conditions under which laborers 
are forced to make an insufficient living. The result was 
enlightening. Probably the outstanding effort of the year 
was the appointment by the Shanghai Municipal Council of 
a Child Labor Commission. Local Christians took a lead- 
ing part in securing this Commission. The arrival in China, 
on the invitation of the National Christian Council, of Dame 
Adelaide Anderson, for twenty-four years chief woman 
inspector of factories in Great Britain and intimately 
acquainted with all industrial problems, has given impetus 
to the feeling that immediate attention must be paid to the 
claims of industrial workers. All this means that the 
Church is trying to prepare a message to China as to what 
kind of a social order is needed and, more especially, as to 
what the Christians are prepared to do to bring it about. 
The drive for human life and dignity is gaining momentum 
and meaning.—HKditorial, Chinese Recorder, January, 1924, 
pp. 5, 6. 

The true measurement of the depth of Christianity’s con- 
tribution to China is the depth to which Christianity is 
responsible for those great modern tendencies of the West 
.to which China is especially sensitive at the present time. 
We must look as far as the extent of the Christian permea- 
tion of modern life. As a matter of fact we find the young 
men of China today eagerly alert to appropriate and use for 
their country all the noblest fruits of Occidental culture, 
such as the democratic ideals, the humanitarian impulses, 
the purposes of social reform and reconstruction, the concrete 
schemes for alleviation and uplift. If these values are the 
product of Christianity either in whole or in part, then 


Health and Social Reform 63 


Christianity’s contribution to China, whether called by name 
or not, is tremendous. The young thinkers of China may 
not, as yet, have grasped the connection between Christi- 
anity and the choicest flowerings of Western civilization. 
They may even couple it with darker, more sinister phases, 
as when one is quoted by Professor Dewey to the effect that 
“Christ is now riding on a cannon-ball to China.” But we 
of the West know how insuperable is the difficulty to sepa- 
rate the spirit of Christ from the development of such insti- 
tutions as the hospital, the social settlement, the humane 
prison, the meliorative asylum for mental defectives; and 
such movements as those to prevent child labor, to maintain 
the right of the living wage, to enlarge the sphere of woman, 
to conserve human life in the conditions of our modern 
industrialism, to secure to all a common school education, 
and many more such trends that grow out of a real love 
for fellow-men. And we know likewise how antipodal to 
everything for which Christ stood are war, exploitation, sel- 
fish aggression, the inhumanity of a depersonalized economic 
system, and other features of an ugly list of which, in its 
heart of hearts, the West is profoundly ashamed. If it is 
our holier goods that commend themselves to present-day 
China, and they do, then a contribution of incalculable 
importance is being made by Christianity and one which is 
as deep and lasting as the appeal of complete liberation to 
the human spirit. Young China especially admires and 
cherishes the Christian values in our Western civilization. 
In this fact there is much hope. 

Christianity can fail in China only if it fails in its 
struggle with the grim problems arising from the more evil 
aspects of modern civilization.—Clarence H. Hamilton, 
Missionary Review of the World, February, 1924, p. 106. 


Missionary societies have always done much for social 
redemption, but they are feeling the call to set themselves 
to it with clearer eyes and worthier preparation. Many mis- 
sionaries have discovered that, to open the path to those rela- 
tions which will allow them to speak of their Gospel, there 
is no better way than natural cooperation with people of 
the country for temperance, housing, decent wages or famine 
relief. It must not be assumed that volunteers who want to 
go out as social workers, without any further professional 
status, will find a number of welfare posts waiting for them 
in the missionary societies. Some there are, certainly, and 


64 Missions and World Problems 


they will be more numerous before long, but what is already 
almost universal is the chance of using our normal activi- 
ties to originate social reform. The teacher, for instance, 
can help and guide the neighbors and the parents of the 
scholars. That is one of the great lessons of the plans, as 
glorious as they are simple, to uplift the negroes in the South- 
ern States of North America. The school is used as a “com- 
munity school”—in other words, the center for all manner 
of welfare work and social stimulus—Frank Lenwood, 
“Forces of the Spirit,” p. 46. 


CHAPTER IV 


MISSIONS AND THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM OF THE 


WESTERN WORLD 


QUESTIONS 


A. Missions and Western Industrialism. 


BS 


Enumerate some of the changes that the introduction 
of machinery has made in family and community life 
in the United States. How has it affected those who 
work on farms? Those who work in factories? 


. What results of the industrial revolution are socially 


helpful and constructive? What results make for a 
less rather than for a more abundant life on the part 
of those most influenced by it? What methods of 
social control have been developed in the West in 
order to avoid the worst results of the industrializa- 
tion of life? 


. Where in Asia and Africa is the industrial system of 


the West expanding most rapidly? Why is this ex- 
pansion coming about? What evils are developing 
in its train? What reasons are there for the failure 
to develop adequate social controls for the protection 
of the peoples against these evils? 


. How does this industrial development affect mission- 


ary efforts in the areas concerned? What bearing does 
it have on the quality and type of church life likely 
to emerge in the wake of missionary endeavor? 
Would you expect the experience of home mission- 
aries in industrial areas in the United States to be 
repeated elsewhere? In what particulars? 


. What responsibility do the missionaries or the rising 


65 


66 Missions and World Problems 


Churches on the field have for guiding backward or 
defenseless groups toward protective measures against 
industrial evils? Is social amelioration of this sort a 
missionary and Church function, or should it be 
brought about through distinctly social movements ? 

6. When the social ideals of missionaries come into con- 
flict with the industrial and commercial practices of 
occidental economic leaders who are active in the 
East, what should be done about it? Will the sup- 
porters of missions at home countenance conflict be- 
tween two groups of American nationals abroad? 

7. Some say that proposing to export Christianity 
missionary benevolence suggests the existence of a 
surplus at home and also induces an unwarranted 
complacency towards industrial conditions in this 
country. What would you say? 

8. Do the Churches and their members in the United 
States have any obligation with reference to condi- 
tions in industry in this country? Should individual 
churches seek to better conditions in their own com- 
munities? Should there be cooperative action on the 
part of all churches in given communities? Should 
there be nation-wide cooperation looking even to recon- 
struction of the industrial system? Is this a function 
of the Churches? If it is not, whose business is it? 
If it is, can the Churches achieve such a mission and 
yet provide spiritual guidance and leadership for the 
people? 


B. Missions and World Commerce. 


1. Do you know of any markets the United States, or 
France, or Germany, or England are eager to secure? 
What are they? Why is every industrial nation seek- 
ing markets abroad? What do these industrial na- 
tions seek in return for their products? Is such inter- 
national trade wholesome or unwholesome for the 


The Western Economic System 67 


peoples mutually concerned? What makes for the 
wholesomeness or unwholesomeness in each case? 

2. What do you know of the selling methods of trade 
agents from the West? Do these methods seem to 
you to make for international good will? In what 
ways? Do the ethical standards current in interna- 
tional commerce speak well for the way in which 
Christianity is taken in the West? For the promise 
of Christianity in the non-Christian nations? _ 

3. It is often said that trade follows the missionary. 
Is this true? Would trade wait for the missionary? 
Does the missionary lead on behalf of trade? Should 
he ever do so? 

4. Just what is the missionary’s concern with respect to 
the articles of international commerce? With respect 
to the methods of international commerce? With 
respect to the personnel from the West who are 
engaged in international commerce? 

5. What, if anything, can the missionary appropriately 
do to protect the people among whom he works from 
the cupidity of certain of the occidental tradesmen? 
To protect them from exploitation by their own 
nationals? 


C. Missions and Economic Imperialism. 


1. How do concessions granted by weak governments to 
industrialists of strong nations lead to “economic im- 
perialism”? Is the occupation of the continent of 
Africa by European nations economic imperialism? 
Is the United States’ policy toward the Philippines 
dictated by economic imperialism? The policy of the 
United States toward Haiti? Toward Cuba? To- 
ward Nicaragua? Toward Mexico? What do you 
mean by “economic imperialism”? In what parts of 
the world is economic exploitation at its worst? 

2. Should tribes or peoples lacking initiative or a knowl- 


68 


Missions and World Problems 


edge of modern technical processes be left in control 
of natural resources which are needed by more ad- 


- vanced groups? 
. What right have people simply as first-comers to undis- 


turbed use of their ancestral territory and resources? 
Under what conditions may access on behalf of other 
more advanced groups be insisted upon? How were 
the territory of the United States and its outlying 
possessions acquired ? 


. Under what conditions, if any, may people be forced 


to labor? For what purposes? Is it better for people 
to be forced to labor than to live in indolence? 


. What should be the attitude of missionaries and of 


the supporters of missions toward the economic con- 
trol of areas and peoples by alien powers and agencies? 
“We cannot isolate the question of what we want to 
get in Africa and Asia entirely from the question of 
what we want the African and Asiatic to get.” What 
does the American nation as such wish to get from 
Japan, from China, from Africa, from Mexico? 
What do Americans wish the people of these various 
nations to get? What do the missionaries wish them 
to get? 


. Would you like to see American capital go abroad 


for investment? Why? For investment in what? 
Where? What measures of protection would you like 
to see entered upon by the United States Government 
by way of protecting investments in concessions or 
industries in other lands? 


. What should be the attitude of home-base supporters 


of missions toward the efforts of producers in so-called 

mission lands to find markets in the United States? 

a. Should American friends of missions seek first to 
protect the standards of living of American laborers 
by favoring protective tariffs? 

b. Should American friends of missions seek to en- 


The Western Economic System 69 


large the markets in America for raw or manu- 
factured products from mission lands? 

ce. Should American friends of missions seek to profit 
from the sale in the United States of the products of 
cheap labor abroad? 

d. Should American friends of missions interest them- 
selves in the conditions of labor in factories abroad 
which produce goods for American consumption ? 

8. If you were a missionary what special interest would 
you have in the investments of your countrymen in the 
field of your choice? Why? 


QUOTATIONS 


Plunging courageously into the mad vortex of modern 
industrial life and building up a great world trade, Japan, 
in the short space of fifty years, has doubled her popula- 
tion and increased her wealth twenty-fold. In 1862 she 
built her first cotton factory. Today she has 44,000 factories 
of all kinds, and 4,000,000 cotton spindles. This sudden 
change from a state mainly agricultural to one which is 
rapidly approaching the industrialism of a manufacturing 
country like Great Britain, has caused an upheaval of soci- 
ety and has brought upon Japan with tenfold intensity all 
the problems of modern industrial life. The widening gap 
between the very rich and the very poor, the bad housing and 
living conditions of the laborers, the lack of adequate means 
of making the needs of the workers felt by the Government, 

. these things combined have brought about a danger- 
ous condition of unrest even among that most conservative 
of all classes, the peasant farmers. 

For the last twenty years, far-sighted Christians and some 
of the ablest non-Christians of Japan have increasingly 
recognized these conditions and are doing their utmost to 
lead the great labor movements of Japan into wise and 
constitutional channels. They are endeavoring to bridge the 
gulf between capital and labor and to bring about a har- 
monious cooperation which will enable the workers to rise 
to a higher level of living. Their aim is to make the capi- 
talists realize that higher efficiency and contentment of the 
workers are the greatest asset of industry, and to awaken 


70 Missions and World Problems 


a public opinion which will support the worker in his 
struggle for better living conditions, for adequate protection 
through factory, housing, and sanitary legislation, and for 
the right to vote——Loretita L. Shaw, Church Missionary 
Review, December, 1924, pp. 315, 316. 


British and American merchants, and to a less extent 
those of other nationalities, have been in China for many 
years. Of late there has been a rather rapid spread of indus- 
trialism organized on the pattern of the West, but unfor- 
tunately on the pattern of the unreformed industrialism of 
half a century ago. Great cotton factories and silk mills 
covering acres of ground are springing up in Shanghai, and 
displacing the old system of household or small shop-weav- 
ing. These mills are run twenty-four hours a day, for the 
most part on twelve-hour shifts, and employ men, women, 
and children. Children of seven or eight years old work 
on twelve or even thirteen hour shifts, and mothers who 
cannot leave their babes at home bring them and lay them 
on the floor in the hot, lint-charged air of the factory. 
Wages are pitiably small, and profits criminally large. 
There are no effective laws, and there is little effective pub- 
lic opinion, to control the situation. Nor can it be controlled 
simply by agitation. China is in the first stages of a great 
industrial transformation. Industry must be profitable or 
it will cease. It must be humane or it will be a curse to 
China—a curse coming from western Christian lands. Only 
a combination of expert knowledge and Christian principles 
ean find a solution of the problem which will prevent this 
new development bringing great damage to a nation which 
ought eventually to be one of the great bearers and exem- 
plars of Christian civilization and the Christian religion. 
The problem is one of education, but of education based on 
research, itself illumined by the Christian sense of human 
values. The [China Educational] Commission believes that 
the Christian forces of China must at once give attention 
to this matter, and is recommending the establishment, as 
early as possible, of an Institute of Social and Economic 
Research, which shall endeavor to discover how business may 
be conducted in China, on the one hand profitably, and on 
the other on Christian principles. This is clearly a task for 
the Christian forces to undertake. The results when reached 
should find expression not only in books and pamphlets and 
public lectures, but in the curriculum of our Christian 


The Western Economic System 71 


schools.—Ernest D. Burton, International Review of Mis- 
sions, July, 1922, pp. 386, 387. 


In Kobe and Osaka in Japan, in Shanghai, Hankow and 
other centers in China, hundreds of great factories belching 
smoke from forests of chimneys employ Japanese and Chi- 
nese men, women and children in numbers that now total 
three or four millions, and are increasing every day. Mod- 
ern industry has drawn millions from the village plough and 
cottage spinning-wheel which have sustained their ancestors 
for at least four thousand years.—Basil Mathews, “The 
Clash of Colour,” p. 37. 


In some respects the changes in China are similar to those 
with which ail students of the industrial revolution in 
Europe are perfectly familiar. The movement from the land 
into large centres of production has begun; home industries 
and open-air occupations are giving place to factory life with 
the consequent effects on health; there is a tendency for cer- 
tain crafts to die out and for the joy of individual creation 
to be lost; a large wage-earning community is growing up 
and gradually becoming class-conscious with the consequent 
dangers of class-war; the scale of living is rapidly increas- 
ing with little if any increase in the joy of life. These and 
similar changes, taking place at a rate far greater than in 
most other countries and with the additional irritant of 
their being caused by foreign interference in a country 
where change has been almost unknown, are producing 
results the full effect of which it is very difficult to estimate 
OT sEOPeCI Sts. 60 5. 

Japan’s industrial development has somewhat alarmed the 
Chinese, not merely because of the effect upon her policy 
in China and the Far East, but as an example of the way 
in which the industrial system may fasten on the body poli- 
tic and even on the soul of a people. During the year 1921 
there were over five hundred strikes in Japan. The great 
industrial centres were full of unrest. I was told by the 
leader of the Labor Movement that it was the Christian idea 
of the value of personality, entirely new, he said, to Japan, 
which was causing this unrest. I found Japanese employers 
alarmed, and eager in not a few cases to do what they could 
to improve conditions. The situation is tense and difficult 
and the Government recognizes the big problem of its 
increasing towns and industrial population. 


%2 Missions and World Problems 


China is entering upon the same path. Will it lead her 
into the same difficulties that Japan is facing and so 
strengthen the tendency towards the twin evils of mate- 
rialism and militarism? Will it lead her along what the 
economic determinist would regard as the only road to eman- 
cipation—class-consciousness and class-war? Or is it pos- 
sible that Chinese good sense, adaptability, patience, and 
peaceableness will enable this great nation to strike out a 
new line, to reach a basis for development that shall escape 
the most serious evils of modern industrialism? The 
answer to this question hangs in the balance. Its issue will 
be of immense significance, not for China alone, but for all 
the members in the family of nations. We Western peoples 
who have forced on her these perplexing problems owe to 
her what service we can render in helping her to solve them. 
Here is a missionary task of the first magnitude to be shared 
in by any who have the knowledge, sympathy and tact 
required, and who will be content to serve where they are 
asked, and will not seek to impose their views upon those 
they want to help. We owe it to China to give our best 
thought and some of our best people to her to help in the 
solution of a problem we have done so much to create.— 
Henry T. Hodgkin, “China in the Family of Nations,” pp. 
171, 195, 196. 


Whether or not we regret the industrialization of the East, 
it has come, and it has come to stay. There is no possibility 
of stemming the irresistible tide of modern civilization of 
which it is a part. There is no question that it will be a 
factor of tremendous importance in the future life of the 
East. But there is still question what kind of factor it will 
become. One of my Chinese friends has summed up the sit- 
uation in words which refer to China, but might also be 
applied to-other countries of the Orient. ‘Whether the 
development of our national resources will be a blessing 
to mankind or a curse to humanity in the future will greatly 
depend upon the attitude of mind of thinking people. Shall 
modern industry serve a few people at the expense of 
thousands of human beings?” 

You will notiee that my friend does not say “Whether the 
development of our national resources will be a blessing to 
China or a curse to China.” She does not even say “whether 
they will be a blessing to Asia or a curse to Asia.” She says, 
“Whether they will be a blessing to mankind or a curse to 


The Western Economic System 73 


humanity.” The spirit and conditions which govern modern 
industry in any part of the world today will inevitably either 
bless or curse men and women in every part of the world. For 
our scientific discoveries and inventions have, as Maud Roy- 
den has put it, created “the kind of a world in which no one 
can prosper without helping others to prosper, and no one 
can suffer without causing others to suffer.”—Margaret E. 
Burton, in an address at the Washington Foreign Missions 
Convention, 1925, Student Volunteer Movement Bulletin, 
March, 1925, p. 17. 


The white man has indeed found it to be his destiny “to 
farm the world.” But in the process he has stirred the races 
of the world into new life. He still controls the governing 
machinery and most of the productive industry of the world; 
but his rule is challenged. Some men of the other races 
would fight him. Others would work with him. Few, how- 
ever, would be ready to carry on indefinitely under his un- 
qualified authority —Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” 
p. 31. 


If there is one lesson more than another which the young 
Christian Church of China may learn from western experi- 
ence it is that it should from the outset bring all its forces 
to bear upon the great economic and social problems which 
are going to confront China. The very presentation of 
Christianity must be conditioned by the fact that China is 
entering on the first stages of a great industrial transfor- 
mation. The answer to the question whether industrial- 
ism is going to prove a blessing or a curse to China may 
turn largely on the activity of the Christian community. 
If the Church rules these problems outside her province 
it is difficult to believe that the Chinese, essentially prag- 
matic in their judgment of ideas and institutions, will as a 
people be attracted by the Christian message. On the 
other hand, all, whether Chinese or foreigners, who value 
the things of the spirit and who foresee the terrible menace 
to humanity involved in a purely materialistic develop- 
ment of China’s vast resources, are waiting for a definite 
lead. To make Christianity the master-force of Chinese 
national life the Church must prepare herself to give that 
lead without delay. 

But these economic, social, and political problems are as 
difficult and complex as they are grave and pressing. The 


74 Missions and World Problems 


conditions at present existing represent partly the cumula- 
tive results of the working of certain deeply-rooted Chinese 
social ideas and customs over a long period, partly the 
incipient effects of the recent impact on China of west- 
ern commerce and industry. Any understanding of these 
problems with a view to their solution must involve the 
most careful study of the interplay of different factors. The 
Christian community of China can hope to approach its 
task only through the medium of education, and there is 
perhaps no part of the Christian enterprise which more 
emphatically demands an adequate educational machinery 
to make it possible of accomplishment. 

We have spoken of the need of industrial development 
in China. That development is bound to come. A most 
pressing duty is to see that it comes purged of some of the 
evil forms it has assumed in the West. Oriental students 
have been so impressed by the evils of occidental industrial- 
ism that they have pronounced it a flat denial and a con- 
tradiction of the Christianity which we profess and preach. 
Certainly the Oriental can be pardoned for failing to see 
the doctrine of human brotherhood in western industrial- 
ism. Nor is he to be blamed if he fails to see much emphasis 
on the Christian idea of human values in that industrial- 
PSI Oct, tee 

If China is industrialized without such elevation of wage- 
standards as will bring them into some conformity to Occi- 
dental standards the effect may be world-wide calamity. If 
China sends upon western markets vast masses of goods 
made at present-day low labor costs (which costs in some 
instances have allowed stockholders to make profits of 100 
per cent), the effect will be either that the western nations 
will exclude such goods, which will mean disastrous unem- 
ployment seasons in China, or will admit them, to the im- 
measurable damage of western labor standards. And out 
beyond all this lurk the possibilities of international mis- 
understanding and conflict—China Educational Commis- 
sion, “Christian Education in China,” pp. 219, 220, 237, 240. 


The commercial attaché of the United States in China 
has reported that the Westernized industries of the coun- 
try already include cotton-mills, silk-mills, oil-mills, 
woolen-mills, sawmills, paper-mills, flour-mills, ship-build- 
ing works, knitting works, steel works, printing works, 


The Western Economic System 75 


smelting-works, water works, glass works, brick works, can- 
neries, net factories, match factories, railway shops, sugar 
factories, cigarette factories, newspapers, egg-drying fac- 
tories, furniture factories, chinaware and porcelain fac- 
tories, distilleries, breweries, arsenals, and numberless 
smaller manufacturing enterprises. The cotton and silk- 
mills form the backbone of the new industrial order. Some 
sense of the rate of growth may be caught from the knowl- 
edge that, between 1919 and 1922, the number of cotton- 
mills jumped from 49 to 102. Forty-six per cent of these 
are owned by foreign capital. 

This rapid growth of a Westernized industry has led to 
an increase of more than six hundred per cent in the im- 
ports and exports of China since the opening of this cen- 
tury! No wonder that other nations, eager to secure wealth 
for their people by the control of world markets, see in 
China a great prize to be grasped at almost any price. 

Much of the industry that is growing up in the East 
today is a direct importation from the West. This is, of 
course, true of all the factories that depend upon power 
looms or similar machinery. It is frequently true of other 
forms of labor that, on the surface, appear indigenous.— 
Paul Hutchinson, “China’s Real Revolution,” pp. 112, 113. 


The way in which foreign capital meets its responsibili- 
ties in serving the ends of the new China will, more than 
any other factor, determine the solution of that greatest of 
all problems confronting mankind—the relationship that 
is to exist between the civilizations of the East and the 
West.—J. V. A. MacMurray, Foreign Affairs, April, 1925, 
pp. 422. 


The economic forces working in modern India cannot 
be radically affected by anything which the missions or 
Churches can do, but they can be understood, and unless 
they are understood not only can little be done in the way 
of industrial education but great problems relating to the 
economic life of the Christian community will remain un- 
solved. It is a somewhat ironical circumstance that while 
the movement associated with Mr. Gandhi’s name stands 
opposed to the extension of western industry in India, the 
Indian members of the Fiscal Commission plead for the 
“intense industrialization” of India. What the future 
holds no man tan say, but it appears to be quite inconceiv- 


76 Missions and World Problems 


able that the present flowing tide of industrialism can be 
effectively stayed, nor does it appear at all clearly right 
that it should be stayed. For the Christian movement, 
however, two things stand out quite clear: the first, that the 
situation must be studied thoroughly and understood; the 
second, that Christian principles and standards must be 
brought to bear upon it. Surely there can be no way in 
which Christian influence can be brought to bear so effec- 
tively as by Christian men taking their place in the indus- 
trial life of the country and the Christian Church having 
a mind and a body of opinion of its own on the subject... . 

There can be little doubt that the un-Christianity of the 
western industrial system is one mighty argument in the 
mind of the non-Christian world against the validity of 
Christianity. It may well be that by recreating industry by 
the power of the Christian ethic, and removing the stains 
and blots that mar the industrial civilization of the West, 
the Church may both help India in a uniquely important 
way and at the same time afford the most convincing proof 
of the power of the Gospel.—William Paton, International 
Review of Missions, July, 1924, pp. 410, 411. 


The Conference considers that the contact of Christian 
missions with the industrial life of the country should have 
as its final end the application of Christian principles to 
industrial conditions and the avoidance of the failures of 
the West: and it holds that one value of Christian activity 
in industrial education is the opening thereby made for 
influencing on the social side the new industrial develop- 
ment of the country.—Conference on Industrial Education, 
Allahabad, India, March, 1924, reported in National Chris- 
tian Council Review, May, 1924, p. 178. 


The commercial adventurers of the West who have helped 
to open up the world to trade, and who have extended vastly 
the range of Western influence, have been followed in later 
years by captains of industry whose hand has been heavy 
upon the lives of millions of men in Eastern and Southern 
lands. There has been a native response to these indus- 
trial activities and the capitalists of Japan, and India and 
China, following the example of the West, have turned 
the investment of their wealth into the channels of modern 
industrialism. . . . The pressure of the modern factory 
system unconditioned by laws for the protection of women 


The Western Economic System G7 


and children and for the safety of men and unrestrained 
by even nominal Christian standards is beating happiness, 
health, and life itself out of millions of Asiatic laborers. 

The problem of industrial exploitation is one of the great 
factors of the world situation today. Bombay, Calcutta, 
Canton, Shanghai, Hankow, Tokyo, and Osaka are material 
manifestations of this modern and fast developing peril. 
Some control of the modern industrial order in the Hast is 
essential, not only to the lives of myriads of our fellows, 
but to the industrial peace of the world.—Nelson Bitton, 
“The New World Situation,” in “The Vision of the King- 
dom,” Report of the Missionary Congress of the Scottish 
Churches, Glasgow, Scotland, 1922, pp. 103, 104. 


The Bantu African has two loves that weave themselves 
into his songs and his talk and all his thought—they are 
the love for his land and his cattle. He will sing about these 
as the Persian poet sings of princesses or a Herrick sings of 
his lady love. Yet today in Rhodesia the native has been 
thrown off most of his land, and therefore divorced also 
from his cattle. In other parts of Africa—as in Kenya Col- 
ony for instance—he sees himself since the war thrust from 
his highlands by the white settler. 

“When I enlisted in the war,” he says, “you made great 
promises to me. The war has long been over and the Allies 
won it; but I find new taxes on my huts, new and higher 
prices to pay for my goods, a new invasion of white settlers 
on my lands and Indians competing with me in my trades. 
I have had no other reward.” 

Here—as everywhere—it is fear and insecurity and a 
sense of injustice that are the parents of unrest and race- 
hatred.—Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” pp. 67, 68. 


Whatever a few poets—dreamy enthusiasts sure of bed 
and board, theorists who write in a spirit of perversity— 
may pretend, the world at large is arriving at a pitch of 
intolerance of the lotus eater. It wants him to can or cask 
his lotus berries and ship them overseas in exchange for 
manufactured goods. Therefore the backward peoples would 
be wise to accept for some time longer the advice, the guid- 
ance of those white nations which have the best home educa- 
tion, an unfettered press (the chief safeguard against abuse 
of power), and the beginnings, at least, of a national con- 
science of what is really right and really wrong, according 


%8 Missions and World Problems 


to the canons of Christianity. But they—the Arabs, Syrians, 
Berbers, Negroes, Somalis, Hindus, Chinese, Malays, Tibet- 
ans, and Amerindians—are right to insist on good manners 
and probity in their instructors, and on being allowed to 
share in the administration of their own lands when they 
have fitted themselves for such work by their education and 
training. They are right in refusing to allow money raised 
by the taxation and treasures of their own lands to be spent 
on countries outside—as Congo revenues were once spent 
on the adornment and equipment of Belgian cities and 
pleasure resorts. They are right in demanding equal treat- 
ment with the white man on an equal basis of education and 
ability. If for example the white settler in their country 
has a vote, a native—no matter what his race—must have 
one likewise if he had attained the same educational quali- 
fication. If the public needs require that labor should be 
forced for public works or public emergencies, the resident 
white man must obey the call as much as the native. If 
black men are to be whipped, white men must also for sim- 
ilar misdemeanors come under the lash.—Sir Harry John- 
ston, “The Backward Peoples and Our Relations with 
Them,” pp. 59, 60. 


The exploitation of the tropical and sub-tropical areas of 
the world is rapidly changing its meaning. Until quite 
recent times we have been in the habit of regarding the 
exploitation of the tropics as affecting areas only within 
the parallels of 224 degrees north and south of the Equa- 
torial line; we now know that conditions of labor vary 
within these areas according to altitude, density of forest 
lands, rainfall, and proximity to coast line, whilst far 
south of the tropic of Capricorn, at an altitude exceeding 
6,000 feet, the low-grade mines of the Rand, through 
their humidity and depth, almost everywhere generate 
conditions but little if at all different from those of the 
tropics. 

From the economic standpoint the real dividing line is 
physical, not geographical; colonization in its truest sense 
is not exploitation, but development. By colonization we 
mean the development of virgin territories by the aid of 
settlement and labor. The test question which differen- 
tiates colonization from exploitation is whether the immi- 
grant can live a normal domestic life, marry, bring forth 
and educate children, and himself cultivate the soil. If 


The Western Economic System fE) 


this test fails, and the immigrant gathers the produce from 
the country by first dislodging the native producer and 
then, by one means or another, forcing the native to labor, 
then a system of exploitation is set up, and, as Booker 
Washington was in the habit of saying—“there is all the 
difference between working and being worked.”—John H. 
Harris, “The Economic Exploitation of the Tropics,” in 
“Western Races and the World.” Edited by F. 8S. Marvin, 
pp. 209, 210. 


The sins of our Western civilization are for the most part 
automatic developments of carelessness and _ selfishness, 
but are not really intended by the society in which they 
grow. In many of these more primitive communities and 
among some of the great Eastern peoples, where the white 
man turns any stone under which he is likely to find a 
dollar, the evil is of a more crude, deliberate and indeed 
diabolical, kind. There is deliberate exploitation, deliber- 
ate cheating, deliberate smuggling of noxious drugs. Ata 
farmers’ meeting held in July, 1919, a farmer in South 
Africa advocated the systematic supply of drink to natives, 
because, while they remained sober, they were making too 
much progress to be treated any longer as serfs. British 
and American firms made public rejoicing that China was 
likely to be freed from the opium which had cursed her and 
set afoot immediate plans for breweries in China to provide 
a substitute. Among this unholy fraternity the Americans 
were in a better position than the rest, because after prohi- 
bition brewing plants were going cheap. It is possible in 
England to ignore the aggregation of evil. In Africa and 
the East it comes to a hand-to-hand fight between the little 
unsupported army of God and all the devils that can possess 
man’s soul.—Frank Lenwood, in ©.O.P.E.C. Commission 
Reports, Vol. XI., pp. 207, 208. 


We do not criticize the United States for its policy of 
publicity. Every nation has its own methods, and we all 
know that good taste and moderation are not typical traits 
of our transatlantic neighbors. We do not criticize their 
desire to hold the first place in China—that is due partly 
to their sporting spirit. But we do wish to emphasize the 
insinuating and hypocritical tactics of these arrivistes. 
Priests and preachers of every denomination are less intent 
on conversions than on commerce. They are not mission- 


80 Missions and World Problems 


aries seeking to evangelize indifferent Chinamen, but 
commercial travelers preparing the way for the fin- 
anciers, engineers, and promoters of their country. Their 
leader is naturally the American Minister at Peking. 
That official is invariably a “representative,” in precisely 
the meaning that we give that word in trade. It is im- 
possible to call such sandwich-men of American wares 
diplomats. 

America has taken shrewd advantage of the anarchy 
that has overwhelmed China for the last ten years to further 
her tireless commercial propaganda. Some American mis- 
sionaries even boast that they really started the Revolution 
of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. Behold 
these reverend gentlemen transformed into political agita- 
tors, and troubling the waters of the Heavenly Kingdom in 
order to fish more successfully in their depths!—From a 
translation in The Living Age, for January 19, 1924, of an 
article by George Dubarbier, in La Nouvelle Revue, Decem- 
ber 1, 19238. 


A Frenchman has recently sharply criticized American 
missionaries in China. His criticism was first published 
in France, then in the “Living Age” for January and now 
in the “China Weekly Review.” In the eyes of this critic, 
missionaries are more intent on assisting the financiers of 
their country than in doing evangelistic work. Further- 
more, they are semi-political propagandists for Government 
policies. With the political aspects of this criticism it is 
not ours to deal. The suggestion, however, that “priests 
and preachers” are commercial travellers in disguise is very 
far-fetched. It is an assumption pure and simple. In fact, 
the criticism of the missionaries by the merchants has been 
that they are not sufficiently sympathetic with their—the 
merchants’—aims. It is true that there has been a rap- 
prochement of missionaries and merchants, in the case of 
more than one country. The main significance of this criti- 
cism is that the missionary must take every possible care 
to make his motive clear. With the best intentions in the 
world he is likely to be misunderstood. If Westerners 
thus misrepresent the main trend of mission work in China 
we cannot wonder if the Chinese do it. Missionaries prob- 
ably need to give a little more attention to making clear 
the fact that their motive is not exploitation in any sense, 
political or commercial, but one of service. There is no 


The Western Economic System 81 


question that this is true, but that some people misunder- 
stand their position also seems to be true.—The Chinese 
Recorder, May, 1924, p. 342. 


The copper mines of the Katanga district, in the south 
Belgian Congo, were well known to the natives before the 
advent of the white man. In the eighties F. 8. Arnot, the 
missionary pioneer, wrote of Arab caravans trading be- 
tween the mines of Katanga and the markets of Uganda. 
Then came the white man, with his rapid comprehension of 
what copper in Central Africa would mean to the world 
outside. ‘The first need was for transport, and even a slight 
examination of a modern map of Africa reveals the process 
of his thinking as it has materialized in iron rails creep- 
ing from every direction towards Katanga. From Benguela 
on the west coast the railway already covers nearly four 
hundred of the twelve hundred miles which lie between it 
and the Katanga junction Fungurume (the remaining eight 
hundred can be traversed by the now completed motor 
road). Cape Town is in direct rail communication with the 
same junction. From it Dar-es-Salaam and Beira on the 
east coast and Cairo in the north can be reached by a com- 
bined rail, lake and river route—less serviceable for trade 
transport than for passengers. On the north-west the 
Lower Congo-Katanga railway is ever gradually pushing 
its way onwards towards [lebo on the Kasai river, which 
is navigable to that point. A district in the heart of the 
continent is thus steadily becoming accessible, and its 
wealth, hoarded and hidden throughout centuries, is begin- 
ning an equally steady outward flow. The freight carried 
by the Katanga Railway in 1922 amounted to 1,695,681 
tons, in 1928 to 2,265,734. Aeroplanes and wireless sta- 
tions have appeared in Africa and will certainly become 
more general and play their part in opening up the interior. 
—International Review of Missions, October, 1924, pp. 481, 
482. 


“The principle that the government of subject peoples 
must be exercised in a spirit of trusteeship won steadily 
increasing recognition. It received its fullest international 
acknowledgment in the following article of the Covenant of 
the League of Nations: 
To those colonies and territories which as a conse- 
quence of the late war have ceased to be under the sov- 


82 Missions and World Problems 


ereignty of the States which formerly governed them 
and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand 
by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the 
modern world, there should be applied the principle that 
the well-being and development of such peoples form a 
sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the 
performance of this trust should be embodied in this 
Covenant. The best method of giving practical effect 
to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples 
should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason 
of their resources, their experience or their geographical 
position can best undertake this responsibility, and who 
are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be 
exercised by them as mandatories on behalf of the 
League. 


In this article two important principles are affirmed. 
First, it is recognized that the care and advancement of 
weaker peoples are an obligation and responsibility resting 
on those who are more advanced. Secondly, it is laid down 
in regard to the territories with which the article deals that 
the trust belongs to civilization as a whole and that while 
for the sake of simplicity in administration the government 
of these territories is entrusted to a single Power, that 
Power is not to administer them in its own interest but is 
responsible to the general body of which it is the mandatory 
for the proper execution of the common trust. . . . It must 
not be supposed that the government of subject peoples is 
undertaken, or in existing circumstances can be expected 
to be undertaken, from purely philanthropic motives. 
There is no such thing as a missionary nation, Indi- 
viduals may become missionaries, but the day is far dis- 
tant when this may’be expected from a nation. The Euro- 
pean Powers are in Africa primarily from economic, not 
humanitarian, motives. Their object is the development of 
their own industries and trade. But the benefit may be 
made reciprocal. All that need be insisted on is that the 
advantage should always be mutual; and that if and when 
interests conflict, the issue should be decided not through 
the arbitrary and selfish exercise of superior power, but on 
the basis of impartial justice. And this, as we have seen, 
is not the quixotic demand of an impossible idealism, but 
the declared aim of responsible statesmen. It is a policy 
to which the governments of the leading Powers are pub- 


The Western Economic System 83 


licly committed.—J. H. Oldham, “Christianity and the Race 
Problem,” pp. 101-103. 


Whether “World Peace” remains a dream or becomes a 
reality, the war for trade supremacy will go on, and will 
grow steadily more intensive and relentless with increasing 
population. As never before the “Seven Seas” are being 
searched for essential products and raw materials, and 
their control safeguarded against the present and future 
needs of those concerned. Pp 

Time was when we boasted of our “splendid isolation,” 
and, rich in apparently inexhaustible natural resources and 
home markets, scoffed at the need to develop foreign trade. 
That epoch, however, with its narrow provincialism, has 
passed forever. Today our producing classes, whether 
farmers or manufacturers, realize fully that the margin 
between profit and penury hinges upon an export demand 
for surplus products. .- . . In the Far East, Great 
Britain has, and will retain, Singapore, Hongkong, and 
Kowloon, while its Asiatic holdings include India, Burmah, 
the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States, and 
parts of Borneo. France, through its hold on Indo-China, 
controls the ports of Saigon and Haiphong, as also a rail 
line of 500 miles from the latter point into the Chinese 
province of Yunnan. MHolland has the Dutch Hast Indies, 
with the important ports of Batavia, Soerabaya, and 
Macassar. Japan has developed Kobe into a great dis- 
tributing center, and dominates the trade of Korea and 
Manchuria through the ports of Fusan and Dalny. Russia 
retains Vladivostok and the great hinterland of Siberia, 
linked with China and Europe by the Trans-Siberian Rail- 
way. Remains then the United States, and its offering in 
the way of an oriental outpost from which to meet and 
successfully -resist this organized advance of its trade 
adversariés. 

Without its seeking, and in the performance of a national 
duty, Fate thrust upon the United States the Philippine 
archipelago, rich in every natural resource and situated at 
the very doors of this Asiatic treasure house for whose pres- 
ent and potential markets its rivals had fought and 
intrigued and_ sacrificed through almost a_ century. 
Coupled with the Panama Canal, our great Western ports, 
and the Hawaiian Islands and Guam, the Philippines fur- 
nish an incomparable vantage point from which the United 


84 Missions and World Problems 


States can play a leading role in the stirring drama now 
staging in the far Pacific. Within a radius of thirty-five 
hundred miles lives half the population of the globe, while 
a lesser radius of seventeen hundred miles includes the 
ports of Hongkong, Amoy, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama, 
Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Batavia, Soerabaya, and other 
large centers of Oriental trade. With reason the Philip- 
pines have been described as “lying at the cross roads of 
the greatest trade routes of the future.”—D. R. Williams, 
“The United States and the Philippines,” pp. 308-311. 


The danger that looms ahead today for all Eastern coun- 
tries is not the danger of political subjection, but the more 
insidious danger of economic subjection achieved in the 
name of those very political shibboleths of Democracy and 
Self-government which have held the West enthralled. A 
few Western nations today wield political and economic 
control over vast territories in Africa and Asia which con- 
tain resources in the shape of food-stuffs, cotton, rubber, 
vegetable and mineral oils and metals. . . . An oli- 
garchy of bankers and financiers and business men working 
behind the Foreign Offices of a few great Powers might 
exercise and perfect a policy of economic exploitation under 
the guise of protectorates and mandatory powers, of trustee- 
ship of weaker peoples alleged to be incapable of self-goy- 
ernment, and might strengthen their hold upon their respec- 
tive Governments by making them sharers in the booty and 
reducing the burden of taxation. This is the danger that 
the East has to face today. . . . And the policy of pro- 
tection which the sub-conscious mind of the Indian people 
is clamoring for is a protection against this imperialistic 
exploitation now sanctified by a twentieth-century ‘Holy 
Alliance.” It is as much protection against the overgrown 
industrialism of the West as it is a protection for industrial 
self-sufficiency within her own territories.—Professor P. A. 
Wadia, Hconomic Journal, June, 1924, pp. 198, 199. 


The last century has contained instance after instance, 
in the Far East, in the Near East, in Africa, and in the 
islands of the sea, in which the preaching of the Gospel 
has seemed to the natives only preliminary to political or 
economic outrage. Sometimes the two have gone hand in 
hand. Not soon will educated Chinese forget that the char- 
ter under which the Christian missionary operates in his 


The Western Economic System 85 


land was a part of that same Treaty of Nanking that legal- 
ized the importation of opium. So it is that these peoples 
wonder in bewilderment why the bodies that proclaim their 
devotion to the setting-up of the rule of God can be content 
with the individual type of missions, while sins that give 
the very Christian concept of God the lie grow luxuriant. 

The sins that Christianity must face today are not only 
the sins of Greece and Rome. The old sins are still with 
us, but there are sins, international sins, so pervasive that 
they cannot be dealt with on any limited, individual scale. 
So long as these sins survive, any talk of success for Chris- 
tian missions is clear futility. : 

There is economic exploitation. The ruthless manner in 
which the ancient handicrafts of India were destroyed to 
favor the mill-owners of England is a matter of parliamen- 
tary record. And the tale of the developing industrial life 
of India, China and Africa is being written in blood. West- 
ern business demands, and secures, all sorts of govern- 
mental exemptions and favors to ensure its profits when it 
goes abroad. And again and again, when there, it follows 
a policy of inhuman hours and starvation wages that is 
sowing the wind against the future. 

It is probable that the West thinks of Sir John Bowring 
—when it thinks of him at all—as the man who wrote 


In the cross of Christ I glory 
Towering o’er the wrecks of time. 


But the East remembers him as the indefatigable diplomat 
whose labors contributed so much to the legalization of the 
opium traffic in China.—Paul Hutchinson, Atlantic 
Monthly, September, 19238, pp. 391, 392. 


It has to be admitted that the relationship of the West 
with the East, growing more and more complex and wide- 
spread over two centuries, far from attaining its true ful- 
fillment, has given rise to a universal spirit of conflict. The 
consequent strain and unrest have profoundly disturbed 
Asia, and antipathetic forces have been accumulating for 
years in the depth of the Eastern mind. 

The meeting of the East and West has remained incom- 
plete, because the occasions of it have not been disinter- 
ested. The political and commercial ventures carried on 
by Western races—very often by force and against the 
interest and wishes of the countries they have dealt with— 


86 Missions and World Problems 


have created a moral alienation, which is deeply injurious 
to both parties. The perils threatened by this unnatural 
relationship have long been contemptuously ignored by the 
West. But the blind confidence of the strong in their 
apparent invincibility has often led them, from their dream 
of security, into terrible surprises of history. 

It is not the fear of danger or loss to one people or 
another, however, which is most important. The demoral- 
izing influence of the constant estrangement between the 
two “hemispheres, which affects the baser passions of man— 
pride, greed and hypocrisy on the one hand; fear, sus- 
piciousness and flattery on the other—has been developing 
and threatens us with a world-wide spiritual disaster. 

The time has come when we must use all our wisdom to 
understand the situation, and to control it, with a stronger 
trust in moral guidance than in any array of physical 
forces.—Rabindranath Tagore, “Creative Unity,” pp. 163, 164. 


Predatory exploitation . . . is by no means a thing 
of the remote past which modern civilization has gradually 
abandoned, just as it abandoned the Slave Trade. On the 
contrary, it is still one of the most potent forces of the age 
in which we live. Indeed in certain respects it has gained 
recently even greater intensity of power, because it has 
been regarded as a necessary link in the industrial ma- 
chinery which regulates Western society on its economic 
side. 

For population increases rapidly wherever large capital 
is suddenly introduced for industrial purposes at any one 
local center. At these new centers of industry and popula- 
tion continual rises and depressions occur both in trade 
and in human lives. The rate of production in manufac- 
tures is enormously increased and developed by new ma- 
chinery. The population increases in very nearly the same 
ratio. Fresh markets abroad become necessary to keep up 
with the increasing rate of production and population. 
Vacant lands and weakly held areas are occupied by the 
stronger powers. The appetite for annexation grows. Ex- 
pansion becomes regarded as a direct benefit to the nation. 
The growth of population at home is made the pretext for 
new conquests abroad——C. F. Andrews, “Christ and 
Labour,” pp. 104, 105. 


We are concerned with the establishment in Africa of the 


The Western Economic System 87 


Church, the agency that in Africa as elsewhere is to con- 
vert the kingdom of this world into the kingdom of God. 
We cannot understand the Church’s task in Africa with- 
out understanding the past and present relations of Europe 
with Africa. We may look upon the work of the Church in 
Africa as solely concerned with the presentation by indi- 
viduals to individuals of an eternal message of salvation. 
unrelated to the facts of life in Africa today or yesterday, 
political, industrial or any other. But Africans do not so 
regard the Church’s work. They look upon men’s lives as 
they hear men’s words. They judge the gospel message by 
its fruits in life. Preaching the Gospel is not the chief 
things Christians do in Africa, nor when an African hears 
it preached for the first time is that his first experience of 
Christianity. He hears with a mind already in part 
decided. He knows to some extent how the gospel mes- 
senger and those who send him behave and have behaved 
to him. 

What, then, is that already recorded set of facts in the 
minds of Africans? It is, roughly, the relation of slaves 
to masters. We look on slavery as a bygone almost for- 
gotten episode. To Africans in Africa it is a persistent 
fact, varying in form in different parts of Africa and in 
different generations. All Europeans to them are wonder- 
fully clever and powerful persons with white skins and soft 
clothes, with guns that make conquest easy, who demand 
always, and are known always to have demanded, that 
Africans should leave home to work for them. Mission- 
aries are recognized as a special kind of European, who 
urge opinions hard to understand and a code of conduct 
in private life hard to carry out, and they also offer greatly 
desired education. But they are Europeans too, people 
who never cease and never have ceased to demand work. 
If that seems strange it is only because to us slavery is a 
discreditable and forgotten incident. To Africans it is 
the central and changeless fact of their lives—Fulani bin 
Fulani, International Review of Missions, October, 1920, 
pp. 545, 546. 


It is one thing to use high-sounding language, as states- 
men of all countries have done during and since the war, 
with regard to the “sacred trust of civilization”; it is an- 
other and much more difficult thing to translate these 
phrases into administrative practice. But if this. is not 


88 Missions and World Problems 


done the world will be in a worse state than before. Noth- 
ing is more fatal than cant and insincerity. It is much 
better, if the peoples of Africa are to be exploited, that it 
should be done frankly and openly. If we choose the nobler 
policy of trusteeship it is essential that our choice should 
be one of deeds and not simply of words. 

From the missionary point of view the adoption by Afri- 
can governments of a policy consistent with the principle 
of trusteeship is of paramount importance. Any other 
policy must be prejudicial in the highest degree to mission- 
ary work. : 

A policy of exploitation by the European powers must 
inevitably create in the minds of the natives feelings of 
such resentment and bitterness that their hearts will be 
closed against a gospel that is brought to them by repre- 
sentatives of the white race—J. H. Oldham, International 
Review of Missions, April, 1921, pp. 194, 195. 


Another fact that helps us to realize the attitude of the 
present-day Turk towards Christian missions is that his 
contact with foreigners, in general, has convinced him that 
foreigners are in his country for the sake of gaining wealth, 
that they are parasites, leeches, who drain the country of 
its resources, which, if foreigners were excluded, would 
flow into Turkish pockets. Thus their influence is hurtful 
to national prosperity. In view of the multitude of conces- 
sion-hunters who have in the past not thought of aiding the 
country to get on its own feet, but who have been there 
purely for selfish commercial aims, and also in view of the 
fact that contact with foreigners has, of late, usually re- 
sulted in the loss of Turkish territory, it is hardly possible 
to meet this objection merely by denial. It certainly has 
not been possible for Turks to compete on even terms with 
foreigners, in commerce or in the arts and sciences, or in 
professional careers; the latter have occupied places that 
demanded technical ability, because there were no Turks 
capable of replacing them. AI railroad rolling-stock and 
supplies came from abroad, and most railroads were 
operated by foreigners. The telephone company was en- 
tirely a foreign concern, paying money to foreign stock- 
holders. The few factories and mills in the country were 
most of them owned and operated by foreigners, who made 
money while the average Turk grew poorer. We may 


The Western Economic System 89 


marvel at the stand recently taken by the Turkish Govern- 
ment, that no foreign doctors will henceforth be allowed 
to take examinations or secure permission to practice in 
the country; but we can understand it when they explain 
that thus their own physicians will be able to secure the 
clientele which they cannot now attract away from foreign 
experts!—“A Christian Resident of Turkey,’ Missionary 
Review of the World, February, 1924, pp. 94, 95. 


The principle of self-sacrifice for others is incompatible 
with the principles of economics as generally understood. 
It seems too much to expect that foreign countries should 
do other than seek their own benefit and disregard others; 
but, the people cannot understand when the representatives 
of the Western nations on the one hand talk about right- 
eousness, love, and friendship, while on the other hand 
their governments practice these oppressive policies. Look 
at the insistence upon the payment of the indemnities with 
limitation of the raising of import duties. This they think 
is only to suck the blood and the fat of the Chinese people 
for the sake of adding to the wealth of foreign countries.— 
“China Today Through Chinese Eyes,” pp. 115, 116. 


The term Christian has been associated with so much that 
repels the Near East, Africa, and the Orient, that in many 
places the influence of Jesus seems handicapped by being 
linked up with “Christianity.” In the bitterest of non- 
Christian centers, if you say your object in being there is 
to help men live like Jesus did, they will heartily approve. 
If you say you are there as part of an effort “to make the 
world Christian,’ they will resent it to the core. “Chris- 
tian” to the Mohammedans brings up the Crusades; to the 
Jews, bitter persecutions; to the Chinese, opium, western 
aggression, and the attempted partitioning of their coun- 
try. To many an Indian “making the world Christian” is 
equivalent to British imperialism. To most Hindus every 
white man is a Christian—the moral element is not promi- 
nent. In the minds of many non-Christians to Christian- 
ize a land is more to Anglo-Saxonize or Americanize it than 
to make the way of Jesus prevalent there. In many places 
it would not be wise to advocate “‘the Christian way of life,” 
for this brings up to mind the imperfect practice of the 
West rather than the following of Christ himself. Chris- 
tianity, as they see the system, is not combating capitalism 


90 Missions and World Problems 


and militarism. The financial support of Christian organ- 
izations and of many missionaries is closely connected with 
an exploitive system and toleration of the spirit of western 
militant nationalism. In many areas the coming of Chris- 
tianity has been mixed up in their minds with the coming 
of the trader and encroachments of an alien government. 
Individual missionaries have at times denounced some par- 
ticular act, but few missionary societies have defined their 
position with reference to exploitive capitalistic industry 
and imperialistic aggressive governments. The usual 
policy is one of benevolent neutrality—Daniel Johnson 
Fleming, “Whither Bound in Missions,” pp. 59, 60. 


The same problems are met in the mission field as at 
home. It is true that the problems are put more simply 
to a teacher of primitive tribes. Against a non-Christian 
background problems in applied Christianity are seen more 
lucidly. The pictures are in black and white with none of 
the vague and subdued tones with which we are familiar in 
countries which have lived at least in part by the Christian 
faith. But it is more the resemblances than the differences 
that strike the onlooker. 

In the East, for example, an industrial revolution can be 
seen in full progress. Conditions which were familiar in 
this country a hundred years ago are found today in the 
valley of the Yangtse or in the mills of Japan. Already 
the Church of Christ in the East is called to define the 
bearing of the Christian Gospel upon the new and perilous 
relationships between human beings introduced with the 
new industrial system. In the heart of it the problems 
which such a change introduces are problems in human per- 
sonality as it is shaped in its relationships. It cannot be 
a matter of difference to the Christian teacher that a new 
social order should be introduced among his people. He 
Sees it not so much a problem in economics as a problem 
in personality, and as such a direct concern to the preacher 
of Christ. 

The Church of Christ is in being in the East. It must 
shape its own policy more and more. It must work out its 
own salvation. But it is still in the power of the mission- 
ary to give counsel to inexperienced communities. He is 
in some ways the mediator of Christian history. He has 
it in his range of duty to set the new Church in true and 


The Western Economic System 91 


living relations with the Church of Christ, as it has lived 
through the ages.—Edward Shillito, International Review 
of Missions, October, 1924, pp. 587, 588. 


It is not in the terms of economic advantage that the 
most human of the qualities of human nature find their 
expression. The missionary spirit and enterprise is 
founded upon the conviction of the community of the 
moral and spiritual character of men of every race and 
condition; the missionary approaches men and women not 
as the instruments of individual or even of mutual material 
advantage, but as those with whom he may share that which 
in his own experience he has found to be good. The sense 
of human kinship, the possibility of human respect and 
affection, it is these which bring men together, and which 
we hope and trust will remold the conception of the rela- 
tion of Western civilization to the other civilizations of the 
world.—A. J. Carlyle, “The Influence of Christianity,” in 
“Western Races and the World,” edited by F. S. Marvin, 
p. 120. 


The new industrial, commercial, and political conditions 
which have developed in China within recent years call 
for an enlargement of the horizon of Christian education 
and in some cases for a transfer of emphasis. The critical 
situation in the field of industry and commerce, where the 
worst mistakes of the western world are being repeated, 
call for a new emphasis on research by the Christian edu- 
cational forces with a view to the discovery of a method of 
conducting industry and commerce on Christian principles 
and at the same time with financial profit. Such research 
will in turn furnish the necessary basis for determining 
the curriculum and methods of schools in which men may 
be trained for positions of responsibility in industrial and 
commercial enterprises——China Educational Commission, 
“Christian Education in China,” p. 371. 


Christian missions must take a definite attitude towards 
the political and economic aspects of western nationalism. 
The opposition of the peoples of Asia to the political and 
commercial domination of the West is one of the greatest 
and most far-reaching issues of the modern world. The 
occupation of the continent of Africa by European powers 
is an historical fact of immense significance which has 


92 : Missions and World Problems 


occurred during the lifetime of the present generation. In 
these contacts of the West with Asia and Africa there are 
ideal elements with which Christian missions can heartily 
cooperate. But there are also at work vast forces of selfish- 
ness, oppression and injustice which can only provoke 
among the peoples of Asia and Africa feelings of bitter 
antagonism. From these elements in the impact of west- 
ern civilization it is essential that Christian missions 
should definitely dissociate themselves. It is not sufficient 
that they should ignore them as lying outside the religious 
sphere. The facts are there, and if the hearts of Asiatic 
and African peoples are embittered against western nations 
on account of their selfishness and injustice they will be 
steeled against the teaching of missionaries who are the 
representatives of these nations. The only means by which 
this danger can be averted is that it should become known 
and patent to all that those who bear the name of Christ 
are actively opposed to policies and practices of selfishness 
and injustice.—J. H. Oldham, International Review of Mis- 
sions, July, 1920, pp. 378, 379. 


If the missionaries make no effort to Christianize com- 
merce and industry, who is going to undertake this colossal 
task, which, in the opinion of so many religious leaders, 
is the most imperative and urgent in the world today ?—J. 
H. McLean, in an address at the Washington Missionary 
Convention, 1925. 


There are those among us who would like to see the church 
align itself definitely with the labor movement on the theory 
that labor is much more often right than wrong and that its 
activities are in the general direction of justice and freedom. 
The vast majority, however, of those who recognize any func- 
tion at all for the church in this field, believe that it should 
never become a partisan in industrial issues, but rather an 
instrument for the resolving of conflict; that its distinctive 
work is the creation and maintenance of an inclusive fellow- 
ship capable of generating the spiritual power that makes 
industrial solution possible. 

Liberals and radicals who frequently criticize the churches 
for what they consider to be a very weak policy with refer- 
ence to industrial conflicts, forget that the organizing prin- 
ciple of the church is, after all, not an ethical principle; 
that people find themselves within the church not because 


The Western Economic System 93 


of any deliberate acceptance of the ethical teachings of Jesus, 
but because they are drawn to it as a place of worship, of 
repose, and often of “‘compensation” for the distracting and 
disintegrating influences of their working life. Indeed, it is 
probably safe to say that the people who find the greater 
disharmonies between the counsels of perfection which they 
have been taught from childhood and the things they do in 
the competitive struggle of life are more likely to find refuge 
in the church than anyone else. It follows that precisely 
what the church will do in a particular situation is deter- 
mined in part by people who would be best content if it 
would do nothing. 

This does not mean that the church is impotent and useless 
in such a situation, but rather that it is not so much an 
organization for doing things as an association for the cul- 
ture of motives, the changing of attitudes and the building 
up of habits under the inspiration of a constantly widening 
fellowship. Our work in the industrial field rests upon the 
conviction that the greatest service the church can render in 
a situation of industrial conflict is not to take a public 
“stand” or to throw its corporate support to the group which 
may be considered to be in the right but rather to compel its 
own members who are participants in the conflict to reex- 
amine their motives and to aid them in analyzing the moral 
issues which the situation presents.—F. Ernest Johnson, 
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, The 
Survey, April 15, 1925, pp. 100, 101. 


CHAPTER V 
MISSIONS AND WORLD PEACE 


QUESTIONS 


A. The Result of the World War on Christianity at Home 
and Abroad. 


Le 


What Oriental, African or island peoples were repre- 
sented in the combatant forces of the war? In the 
labor batallions? In the areas over which moved 
troops in action or those in retreat? In the areas 
which changed sovereignty as a result of the war or 
of post-war adjustments? 


. What would you expect to be the result of the war on 


the thinking of alien peoples and races as to the effec- 
tiveness of Christianity in promoting and maintain- 
ing a spirit making for peace in the countries from 
which missionaries have gone forth? What have been 
the results of the war on your own thinking on this 
point? On the thinking of those with whom you may 
have discussed it? What reply would you now make 
to inquirers in mission lands who might demand to 
know why Christianity has failed to educate the 
nations of the West in peaceableness ? 


. What oriental faith or faiths might be urged as more 


practicably conducive to peaceable habits among 
peoples than is Christianity? By what tests of expe- 
rience would you feel that such a comparison could 
be carried out? 


B. The Movement for Peace and Its Bearing on Mission 
Progress. 


1. Some say that the next war, when it comes, will be 


for the control of the Pacific basin, that is, between 
94 


World Peace 95 


the white and yellow races. What effect would you 
expect such a war to have on the further development 
of the Christian movement in Asia? 

. What present situations in Asia or elsewhere tend to 
strengthen, in the minds of Asiatics, the case of those 
among them who look to military armaments to secure 
their interests and rights? 

3. Just what can Western searchers for the way of peace 
learn from Orientals, such as Gandhi and Tagore, who 
are opposed to the use of force? 

4, What are the major forces making for peace in the 
world? In how far are these forces part of organized 
Christianity? What are the best ways of strengthen- 
ing these forces? What stake have missions in their 
success ? 

. Would you prefer to have economically backward peo- 
ple endure exploitation rather than to have them use 
force in an attempt to throw off the yoke of alien finan- 
cial control? Is this the alternative? If not, what 
are other ways out? 


bo 


CU 


CO. The Possible Contribution of the Missionary Movement to 
the Promotion of World Peace. 


1. Which of the following would you regard as unessen- 
tial if peace is to be achieved and maintained in the 
world? 

a. Mutual understanding and good will between races 
and between nations? 

b. Social and economic justice throughout the world? 

ce. Enlargement of opportunity for those capable of 
improving it? 

d. The development of knowledge, character and a 
consuming desire for a worthy world life? 

How are such conditions to be secured? By just what 

processes are backward peoples, for instance, to be 

helped to the more abundant life essential to fair, 


96 Missions and World Problems 


hearty and understanding participation in the broader 
fellowship of the world? 

2. Where does the obligation primarily rest to promote 
the life of good will among all peoples? On the State? 
On society as such? On the schools? On the 
Churches? On individual righteousness? Just how 
is good will generated? What processes tend to its 
production? What to its destruction? 

3. What contribution may fairly be expected from mis- 
sions toward this whole field of endeavor? Should the 
promotion of world peace be a distinctive and direct 
effort or is it a by-product? If the latter, then of 
what? 

4. Would you support a movement for international 
peace that involved sending Asiatic missionaries to 
the United States? Explain why or why not? 


QUOTATIONS 


Seven millions of men killed and twenty millions, six hun- 
dred thousand wounded—these, according to the best sta- 
tistics available, were the casualties in the war of 1914-1918, 
a war involving 1,575 millions of people and leaving only 
136 millions of the human race to escape its flames. The 
lives of probably twenty-eight millions who were members of 
the families of the killed, cruelly and irreparably torn, and 
the lives of probably eighty millions who were members of 
the families of the wounded more or less permanently and 
seriously handicapped—this was involved in the casualties 
of the war. Debts aggregating 249 billions of dollars gold 
were incurred by the various governments in carrying on the 
war, debts whose service and liquidation will place a very 
heavy burden of taxation upon about 1,030 million people— 
two-thirds of the human race—for several generations to 
come—these were the legacy of the war. Destruction of 
property devoted to peaceful and useful pursuits (not to 
mention the billions of dollars of war materials consumed) 
ageregating 50 billions of dollars or more at a moderate esti- 
mate—this was incidental to the conflict. These were some 
of the principal direct effects of one war. 


World Peace 97 


And the indirect effects! The starvation of probably ten 
millions of people in Russia and the Near East, the massacre 
of probably two millions of Armenians, the death of prob- 
ably five millions from cholera, typhoid fever and other pesti- 
lences, the serious undernourishment and weakening of prob- 
ably two hundred millions of people in Russia, Austria and 
Germany—these were some of the principal indirect effects 
of the war. The breakdown of the currency systems of Rus- 
sia, Poland, Austria and Germany, threatening in these coun- 
tries the destruction of the entire foundation of our modern 
economic system and the total collapse of modern civiliza- 
tion; the serious strain upon the currency systems of France, 
Belgium, Italy, Hungary, and the Balkan States, causing 
the gravest dislocation of the economic life of those countries 
and the gravest injustice to their thrifty savers and investors 
—these were indirect results of the war that will require 
many years for their correction.—Oscar Newfang, “The Road 
to World Peace,” pp. ix, x. 


Bitter humiliation awaits all of us who preach the Gospel 
in distant lands. ‘Where, indeed, is your ethical religion?” 
—that is the question we are asked, no matter whether we 
are among more primitive peoples in out-of-the-way places 
or among the educated classes in the large centers of East- 
ern and African civilization. What Christianity has 
accomplished as the religion of love is believed to have been 
blotted out by the fact that it failed to educate the Chris- 
tian nations to peaceableness, and that in the war it asso- 
ciated itself with so much worldliness and hatred, from 
which to this day it has not yet broken away. It has been 
so terribly unfaithful to the spirit of Jesus. When preach- 
ing the Gospel in the mission field, let us not minimize 
this deplorable fact in any way nor try to gloss it over. 
And why have we fallen so low? Because we fancied it an 
easy thing to have the spirit of Jesus. Henceforward we 
must strive after that spirit much more seriously. 

Preaching the Gospel in foreign lands today we are the 
advance-guard of an army that has suffered a defeat and 
needs to be made fit again. Let us be courageous advance- 
guards. The truth which the Gospel of Jesus carries within 
itself cannot be impaired by men’s errors nor by their lack 
of faithfulness. And if only our lives, in genuine noncon- 
formity to the world, reveal something of what it means to 


98 Missions and World Problems 


be apprehended by the living, ethical God, then something 
of the truth of Jesus goes out from us.—Albert Schweitzer, 
“Christianity and the Religions of the World,” pp. 91-93. 


The high state of development which Europe had attained 
not only failed to prevent the inconceivable absurdity of 
war, but even facilitated the use of every device of modern 
science to intensify its stupid mechanical horrors. We 
know in our hearts that civilization without a spiritual 
principle is bound to fail. 

The war, however, is just what makes some doubt the 
most. “Christianity has no more availed to stop the war 
than civilization. How futile appear the Churches of the 
Prince of peace! Labor and similar movements, though 
making no Christian profession, will leave the Church 
behind and lead the advance along the path of right.” In 
the autumn of 1914 many wrote in this strain, but the fol- 
lowing years have given time to test their judgment. Even 
in the form of International Socialism, Labor has proved 
that it is easier to draft a program in committee than to 
get the rank and file to accept it. Our mentors now speak 
in the humbler tones of men who have found that it is 
easy to lose the way. 

Of course, the failure of others does not condone the fail- 
ure of the Church. Minority as she may be, if the Church 
had been faithful to her Master’s teaching, the majority 
outside her borders could never have made the war. 
The Church must face the world’s judgment. But the 
very fact that she is judged by the standards of Jesus shows 
the place which is given to Him by the conscience of the 
great world. The temper of the. Churches is not Chris- 
tianity—indeed, that is the indictment against them—and 
any thoughtful man can make the distinction. Christianity 
stands above the war as the one remedy for the diseases of 
human society, the one foundation for that new world we 
are committed to create. 

Further, the foreign missionary enterprise is the one 
conspicuous internationalism. To the very ends of the 
earth it sends men out. To black and yellow, to clever and 
stupid, to attractive and repulsive, the missionary goes in 
the name of Jesus Christ. His support is found by men 
at home who have an interest in peoples they have never 
seen, and who wish to share with them the good that Chris- 


World Peace — 99 


tianity brings. For a parallel we should scarcely look to 
secular history, but we may well ask whether in the whole 
history of the Church there is any movement so remarkable. 
Is there any such corporate unselfishness or such an 
instance of imagination dedicated to the service of man- 
kind ?—F rank Lenwood, “Social Problems and the East,” 
pp. 28-30. 


The effects of the World War constitute a powerful factor 
in the development of native mentality. The Bantu were 
taken by surprise that European nations who led in edu- 
cation and Christianity should find no other means than 
the sword and accumulated destructive weapons to settle 
their diplomatic differences. Their vast contingent of 
laborers drawn from every tribe visited France, and re- 
turned to educate every section of the Bantu on the good- 
ness of whites in Europe as against the hardness of whites 
in South Africa.—D. D. T. Jabavu, International Review 
of Missions, April, 1922, p. 254. 


White men say, “Our civilization is the higher.” To this 
the other races make reply, some by pointing with derision 
to the moral debacle of world-war; others with the declara- 
tion, “Only through freedom have you won the power to be 
great, and we must have that same freedom.” White men 
declare that if the other races try to rule themselves they 
will make tragic, catastrophic blunders. To this they say: 
“Even if we make blunders and stumble and fall, they shall 
be our blunders from which we suffer and not—as now— 
yours.”—Basil Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” p. 30. 





For centuries the Churches have consistently encouraged 
men’s avarice and bloodlust, and discouraged every 
approach to humane and kindly feeling. The late World 
War would never have been so disastrous had not the 
Churches committed their habitual betrayal of Him whom 
they profess to serve. If, instead of using their pulpits 
as recruiting platforms and their chancel steps as gun 
mounts, the Christian Churches all over the world had pro- 
nounced against war and denounced it as anti-Christian 
and inhuman, Christian missionaries in China might feel 
more justification for their existence. One may therefore 
be excused for thinking that the doctrines of Christ are 
either useless or dangerous. They are useless, as those who 


100 Missions and World Problems 


profess Christianity—and it has always been fashionable 
to do so—in general profess it only with their lips and are 
otherwise unaffected in their pursuit of egotistic ends. If 
they are put in practice they become dangerous, because 
there are always some people who are really possessed by 
the high ultra-human ideals of Christ, and these people find 
themselves almost inevitably driven into the position of 
rebels and revolutionists, social and political outcasts, as 
Christ Himself was, since vested interests have always 
interpreted Christ’s teachings in their own, narrow inter- 
ests.—T’ang Yen Tao, Student World, January, 1924, pp. 
24, 25. 


No service which a better ordering of international 
affairs can render to missionary enterprise is comparable 
in importance to the object which gave its first impetus to 
the formation of a League of Nations—the prevention of 
war. War, and especially war between professedly Chris- 
tian powers, not only makes plain the past failure of Chris- 
tian forces, but hinders them in their present work and 
handicaps them for the future. We do not, indeed, forget 
that the Master came to send “not peace, but a sword” 
(Matt. 10. 34); and that the missionary Church is in a 
special sense described as “the Church militant.” Even the 
literal and actual warfare carried on between nation and 
nation may, in a wonderful way, be at times overruled for 
the purifying and establishing of the Church, since it has 
often grown weak in prosperity and revived amid danger 
and violence. But in the normal order of life peace is the 
greatest interest of the missionary cause. 

The mere waste of the capital accumulated by the toil 
of past generations is serious enough, since it involves the 
reduction of the standard of living of many thousands in 
different countries, among whom are numbered many of 
the most faithful supporters of missionary work. The dis- 
location of the eastern exchanges—a result of the war 
which few can have foreseen in its full seriousness—has 
also placed a new and particularly galling burden on the 
finances of the societies in Europe, and to a less degree in 
the United States. Thus missionary enterprise is acutely 
affected and injured even by the indirect and incidental 
reactions of war. 

But the economic loss is of small account compared with 


World Peace 101 


the human loss, in lives laid down or bodies crippled and 
unable to carry out the promptings of the spirit. Of those 
who fell in the late war, not a few had already dedicated 
their lives to the missionary calling, and a very great num- 
ber might afterwards have heard the same call, or become 
steady supporters in the home field: they had shown the 
possibilities that were in them by their response to the call 
of the ideal in another form. Of all these the loss cannot 
be computed. But there is another consequence of the war 
which, from the missionary standpoint, is perhaps more 
serious still. There is the moral effect on the non-Christian 
world of the sight of the most powerful nations of the 
world, many of them claiming to be guided by Christian 
principles, locked in a deadly conflict and proclaiming that 
it must be fought out to the bitter end. If the inquirer 
from another continent, the heir to another civilization, 
points first to the fifteen centuries during which the Chris- 
tian Church has had the opportunity to mold the life and 
policy of Europe, and then to the statecraft which led up to 
1914, and if he applies here the test, “By their fruits ye 
shall know them,” what answer is left to the Christian 
apologist?—G. F. Barbour, International Review of Mis- 
sions, July, 1920, pp. 361, 362. 


I feel I should not be true to readers . . . or to my 
own conscience, if I did not mention a difficulty which per- 
haps may not be peculiar to Japan, but which is certainly 
a real one with us, and one which it is the duty of those of 
us who name the name of Christ to recognize fearlessly and 
together. I refer to the attitude of many, who, as a result 
of the Great War and the many failures of the Christian 
Church, tell us that it is of little use to preach the Gospel 
of Christ as “the power of God unto salvation” until in 
the lands that call themselves Christian it has proved itself 
to have this power in social and international relationships. 
Need I say that it is not as a citizen of a country which is 
called non-Christian that I write in any spirit of criticism 
of those who live in the so-called Christian lands? It is 
rather as a brother writing to brothers and sisters in the 
common family of our Lord that I say that together we 
must bear this reproach.—Soichi Saito, “Japan of Today 
and the Christian message,” International Review of Mis- 
sions, October, 1923, p. 548. 


102 Missions and World Problems 


The people of the Western nations have come to China 
to preach Christianity. Chinese, while admiring the evan- 
gelistic enthusiasm of Christians, cannot but observe cer- 
tain points open to criticism. We need not go too much 
into detail, but will merely mention several more important 
matters. The Churches of the nations of the West, not only 
pray for the victory of their own countries in war-time, 
but also directly or indirectly use the strength of the Church 
to aid in war. Is this not contrary to Jesus’ ideal of peace? 
Again, Jesus’ program of world reconstruction certainly 
seeks the abolition of social and national evils, the turning 
of darkness into light. But the Churches of the Western 
nations, wishing to preserve their own positions, too often 
keep silent as to the faults of their governments instead of 
fighting them. Again, they are complacent in the face of 
evil social customs. Is this, they ask, the spirit of Chris- 
tian reconstruction?—“China Today ‘Through Chinese 
Eyes,” pp. 118, 119. 


Another result of the war was entirely unexpected. We 
all looked to peace to usher in a new era of international- 
ism. It gave us a perfect orgy of nationalism. And every- 
thing has been bent to the strengthening of the new na- 
tional consciousness. It has touched the Church in every 
mission field, and has erected delicate and difficult prob- 
lems which we can solve only together.—Kenneth Maclen- 
nan, “The Unity of the Service of the Kingdom of God,” 
in “The Vision of the Kingdom.” Report of the Missionary 
Congress of the Scottish Churches, Glasgow, Scotland, 
1922, p. 285. 


Though individuals have been redeemed from sin, and 
life has been made brighter and happier for communities 
here and there which have embraced Christianity, yet the 
sphere of international relationships is beyond doubt the 
sphere of human life which has yielded least of all to the 
claims of Jesus Christ and His lordship and control. At 
present the world is in a state of utter confusion. We have 
seen only too plainly the dreadful results of our present 
international politics, but we see no way in which their 
results could have been avoided. War is obviously horrible, 
but yet it appears inevitable. The best we could do in the 
last few terrible years was to try to mitigate its horrors, 
or feebly to point to some good features. The critics of 


World Peace 103 


Christianity have hurled burning brands of criticism at 
the unstable thing we call the Kingdom of God. ‘The 
bankruptcy of Christianity now stands confessed,” they 
say. Yet this is just where a little thought will save us 
from depression and despair. This war, far from repre- 
senting the bankruptcy of Christianity, really represents 
a great advance in its conquest of the world. For this is 
the first war of which many people have said that it marks 
the collapse of our religion. In other words, Europe has 
found out that if nations were again Christian there would 
be no war.—E. H. F. Campbell, “Christianity and Interna- 
tional Morality,” pp. 54, 55. 


We heard a great deal during the war and in the first two 
years after the Armistice about the failure of the Church. 
We are not hearing so much about that now. It is not that 
people no longer believe what they meant by that phrase, 
but that, however much they may feel that the representa- 
tives of Christianity have failed, they are intensely con- 
scious of the need for what Christianity professes to supply. 
During the war, however deeply conscious men were of the 
horror of such an event within a professedly Christian 
civilization, they mostly saw pretty plainly what they 
believed to be their duty. After the war there was at first 
an almost universal relaxation, which has had nearly as 
much as the war itself to do with our present troubles; most 
people were just enjoying the moment, as the short boom 
in industry enabled them to do, and were not asking what 
their duty was. Now we have reached the inevitable stage 
of disillusionment, and though few people, probably, have 
as yet turned to the Church for what they want, at least 
they know that the world desperately needs something 
which only a world-religion can supply. Consequently, 
even if they still feel that the Church has failed, as they 
put it, that is not the uppermost thought in their minds. 
They are not now, as during the war, chiefly indignant with 
those who have let the world get into this parlous state; 
they are chiefly anxious to know what is the way out, and 
are wondering whether, in spite of the failure of Chris- 
tian people to avert these calamities, Christianity may not 
after all supply the clue—From an address by the Rt. Rev. 
W. Temple, at a Conference on International and Mission- 
ary Questions, Manchester, England, December 31, 1924. 


104 Missions and World Problems 


Japan had all her wealth of humanity, her harmony of 
heroism and beauty, her depth of self-control and richness 
of self-expression; yet the Western nations felt no respect 
for her, till she proved that the bloodhounds of Satan are 
not only bred in the kennels of Europe, but can also be 
domesticated in Japan and fed with man’s miseries. They 
admit Japan’s equality with themselves, only when they 
know that Japan also possesses the key to open the flood- 
gate of hell-fire upon the fair earth, whenever she chooses, 
and can dance, in their own measure, the devil dance of 
pillage, murder and ravishment of innocent women, while 
the world goes to ruin. We know that, in the early stage 
of man’s moral immaturity, he only feels reverence for the 
god whose malevolence he dreads. But is this the ideal of 
man which we can look up to with pride? After centuries 
of civilization nations fearing each other like the prowling 
wild beasts of the night-time; shutting their doors of hos- 
pitality; combining only for purpose of aggression or 
defense; hiding in their holes their trade secrets, state 
secrets, secrets of their armaments; making peace offerings 
to the barking dogs of each other with the meat which does 
not belong to them; holding down fallen races struggling 
to stand upon their feet; with their right hands dispensing 
religion to weaker peoples, while robbing them with their 
left—is there anything in this to make us envious? Are 
we to bend our knees to the spirit of this nationalism, which 
is sowing broadcast over all the world seeds of fear, greed, 
suspicion, unashamed lies of its diplomacy, and unctuous 
lies of its profession of peace and goodwill and universal 
brotherhood of man? Can we have no doubt in our minds, 
when we rush to the Western market to buy this foreign 
product in exchange for our own inheritance? I am aware 
how difficult it is to know one’s self; and the man who is 
intoxicated furiously denies his drunkenness; yet the West 
herself is anxiously thinking of her problems and trying 
experiments. But she is like a glutton, who has not the 
heart to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly 
clings to the hope that he can cure his nightmares of indi- 
gestion by medicine——Rabindranath Tagore, ‘“National- 
ism,” pp. 102-104. 


It is not possible to say that Christianity has yet fully 
vindicated its power to unite the peoples of the world or to 


World Peace 105 


shape our social and national policies. No nation can be 
called a Christian nation, and the Western States have 
certainly not exhibited the Christian virtues in any clear 
way in their dealings with China. Therefore we need not 
wonder if there is still a measure of doubt in the minds 
of Chinese as to the value of Christianity for their country. 
But it can be said that many individual Christian Chinese 
have been trusted by their fellow-citizens, that a large num- 
ber of Chinese who are not Christians have recognized the 
ability and honesty of men trained in mission schools, and 
that the Church in China is one of the chief factors making 
for social betterment and international goodwill. Ai 

I see in the Christian movement in China the chief direc- 
tion in which China’s coming into the family of nations is 
being dealt with in the right spirit. In this sphere she is 
seeing the West at its highest point in the persons of 
devoted and large-hearted men and women, she is discover- 
ing how she may relate herself to the higher life of the West 
and how she may give her best to the West in the common 
enterprise of the Spirit. Those elements in the movement 
which are open to criticism do not by any means destroy its 
value. They should certainly be dealt with and removed, 
and all that tends to genuine Chinese leadership and 
Chinese thought should be encouraged. In this way West- 
ern nations may help China to see that there are some who 
truly believe in China’s own greatness and who seek her 
presence among the nations, not for the profit to be gained 
from her commerce, but for the enrichment of our common 
life in the one family.—Henry T. Hodgkin, “China in the 
Family of Nations,’ pp. 158, 162, 163. 


The missionary is more,than an interpreter, . . he 
is a creator. -He brings a new life, and a new ideal, and a 
new idea of God and humanity to the people. Let us as 
missionaries face the new task with caution, with kindness 
but without fear. We have a part to play in the reconstruc- 
tion of the world.—C. J. L. Bates, Japan LHvangelist, 
August-September, 1919, p. 291. 


One of the assets of the mission college is the broadening 
touch it gives with other lands. It tends to develop as one 
of its finest by-products an international habit of thought 
in teachers scarcely less than in students. Recent events 


106 Missions and World Problems 


have given poignant emphasis to the importance of such 
an outlook on life. If, as is being frequently asserted by 
publicists, the road to the peace of the world lies through 
China, just as does the provocation for another World War, 
the presence of colleges exemplifying world-wide brother- 
hood assumes a new significance. But really to accomplish 
such a cross-fertilization of cultures, they should be as inclu- 
sive as possible. For this reason Anglo-American coopera- 
tion should be encouraged, and if impracticable in certain 
institutions, it constitutes an added argument for a closer 
inter-relation among them as a group. Similar association 
with continental societies, or at least the presence of indi- 
viduals from other European countries, is distinctly an 
advantage. All this gains much greater force when we look 
forward to increasing Chinese control in these colleges. 
They will’ come thus into a heritage more comprehensive 
and catholic than if in each case they merely perpetuate an 
American or British or Scandinavian type. Whether there- 
fore in a given university or whether by intimate associa- 
tion in a system of Christian higher education, the fusion 
of the distinctive features of each country makes for the 
enrichment of the whole and prepares the way for them 
all to become in the fullest sense Chinese.—J. Leighton 
Stuart, International Review of Missions, April, 1924, pp. 
248, 244. 


The whole world knows of the strained relationship be- 
tween China and her nearest neighbor, Japan. The Chinese 
Christian feels as keenly as the rest of his fellow country- 
men the injustice of the high-handed treatment of China 
by the military masters of that country. There is, how- 
ever, no ill feeling against the Japanese people on the part 
of the Chinese Christians and of all intelligent people in 
China. But we feel it is the duty of every lover of truth 
and justice to hate injustice and despotism and fight for 
righteousness and freedom. Has Christianity a helping 
hand to extend to save the situation? Have the Christians 
of these two nations anything to say or do? Can those who 
would live and die for the same Christian principles stand 
together against the common foe, irrespective of nation- 
ality? Are we willing and daring enough to stand for 
right against might? The world has yet to see what the 
forces of the Christian army can do, in the strength of their 


World Peace 107 


Lord, in helping to solve such world problems of which 
there are many.—Cheng Ching Yi, “The Chinese Church,” 
in “China Today Through Chinese Eyes,” pp. 140, 141. 


On December 21, 1923, Count Yamamoto, the Prime Min- 
ister, published a Christmas message which gave exalted 
expression to the Japanese gratitude to foreign peoples for 
the liberality and promptness of their relief. The message 
Says: 

“More than one thousand nine hundred years ago Christ 
was born in Bethlehem of Judea to preach love and mutual 
helpfulness among the world’s peoples, and the spirit of his 
teaching was exhibited in all its beauty by the peoples of 
the world on the occasion of the recent disaster which over- 
took our people, who received and appreciated the relief 
sent by them in the same spirit also. 

“The year 1923 will go down in the history of the realm 
as one of a catastrophe unparalleled in its magnitude and 
far-reaching in its effects. September 1 will forever remain 
in the memory of our people as a day of terrible disaster to 
the nation, but the somber anniversary as it recurs year by 
year, will always remind the whole Japanese nation of the 
bountiful help and ungrudging sympathy received from 
across the seas in those days of affliction. The people in 
foreign countries, perhaps, may not fully realize the inten- 
sity of the emotion of thankfulness that their sympathy 
awoke in our hearts, but indeed it is hardly possible to 
exaggerate in description how deeply moved our people 
were by the humane and warm assistance so liberally be- 
stowed upon them by their friends across the seas. Many 
public and private functions, such as the Tokyo Citizens’ 
Thanksgiving Ceremony for expressing national gratitude 
to foreign nations, have since been held in different parts 
of the country to demonstrate popular feelings. On the 
12th instant, speaking as the representative of the govern- 
ment in the Imperial Diet, I expressed my deep sense of 
thankfulness to the various countries concerned for their 
prompt and spontaneous efforts to succor our countrymen 
at the time of the earthquake. In the Houses of Peers and 
of Representatives, resolutions expressive of the profound 
gratitude of our people for the deep sympathy extended to 
them by foreign sovereigns, rulers and nations alike, 
seconded as it was by material assistance on the most gener- 


108 Missions and World Problems 


ous scale, were moved and unanimously passed as being 
in conformity with the wishes of the people. 

“Tt is the first time that our people have been the recip- 
ients of such cordial compassion and sympathy from all 
parts of the world and it is but natural that they have 
been indelibly impressed thereby. Their constant and most 
earnest desire is to reciprocate as best they may whenever 
opportunity offers. The Japanese people are now fully 
conscious that harmonious cooperation and mutual assist- 
ance among the nations, not only politically but morally, 
must form the basis of international friendship. This idea, 
which the catastrophe rooted forever in the popular mind, 
will, I firmly believe, express itself in diverse ways for the 
betterment of our relations with foreign countries and will 
also act with great force for the preservation of universal 
peace.”—“The Christian Movement in Japan, Korea, and 
Formosa,” 1924, pp. 18, 19. 


Some favored few gain through travel and intimate per- 
sonal contact a feeling of respect, sympathy, and apprecia- 
tion for other peoples. But for the vast majority of human 
beings the experience of world fellowship can come only 
through increasing participation in the pursuit of world 
objectives. As such ends are grasped and made our own, 
world-wide fellowship deepens even with peoples we do not 
see. We grow to spiritual maturity as we participate in 
this process with other humans and with God. Generation 
by generation, aS we grow in the capacity to vision and 
to adopt cooperative ends, our capacity for fellowship with 
God and man will deepen. Such suggestions as the League 
of Nations and the World Court are not merely possible 
ways of escape from war; they may be thought of, also, as 
providing contacts in the pursuit of common ends that will 
mean greater richness of life. The discovery of world-pur- 
poses such as those embodied in the twenty-third article 
of the League of Nations, and the encouragement of people 
everywhere to put first cooperative constructive effort for 
a new and better world is missionary education.—Daniel 
Johnson Fleming, ‘“Whither Bound in Missions,” p. 198. 


By the nature of his calling, the missionary is an apostle 
of internationalism. He bears a message of peace and 
goodwill to all men; he proclaims one God for the human 
race and hence one brotherhood for men; he seeks to estab- 


World Peace 109 


lish a kingdom of universal justice and love; he belongs to 
the Church, an organization which brings into one fellow- 
ship all nations and races. Who can doubt that twenty- 
eight thousand men and women scattered over the earth 
who stand for these things, will accomplish much in the 
way of overcoming the misunderstandings and the prej- 
udices which divide the world? Particularly should this 
be so in respect to the relations of the West and the East. 
There the fundamental need is the interpretation of the 
one civilization to the other. And who can do this better 
than the Westerner living in the East who seeks to see peo- 
ple and things through the eyes of Christ? The late Hamil- 
ton W. Mabie, Literary Editor of the Outlook, upon his 
return from a journey around the world, remarked: “The 
missionary movement has become the greatest unifying 
power at work among men.” Dr. Edward Everett Hale 
once said to the author that in his opinion the first time a 
map of the world was hung in a New England pulpit 
marked a new epoch in human affairs——Cornelius H. Pat- 
ton, “The Business of Missions,” p. 247. 


We should remember that the real power behind inter- 
national as well as national progress towards better con- 
ditions is public opinion—not sudden bursts of temper or 
sentimentality, but enlightened, matured public opinion. 
That is the power behind all human law and all custom. 

There is no reasonable doubt that the great majority 
of the people of most civilized nations are strongly opposed 
to involving themselves in war, and the question inevit- 
ably arises “How is it that nations composed of people 
who don’t want war are continually fighting?’ The an- 
swer is that the opinion against war has been without ade- 
quate institutions to give it effect. War is an interna- 
tional affair; and to prevent it there must be international 
opinion, and international action upon that opinion, and 
the international institutions to give effect to that opinion. 

All these international questions call for an under- 
standing of the infinite varieties of human interests, con- 
ditions, opinions, traditions, prejudices, beliefs, inherited 
modes of thought and feeling, all of which make agree- 
ments difficult—Elihu Root, Foreign Affairs, April, 1925, 
pp. 352, 358, 355. 


If, as we believe, Christianity is the real remedy for the 


110 Missions and World Problems 


ills from which the world is at present suffering, the edu- 
cational work of the Church abroad is of supreme impor- 
tance. If Christian principles are to exert an influence on 
the relations between different nations, they must be under- 
stood and in some form accepted by all peoples. In dealing 
with the question of Christian education among the peoples 
of Asia and Africa, we are touching the springs from which, 
more than from any other source, we may hope that the 
regeneration and reinvigoration of the world may come.— 
J. H. Oldham, “The Western Contribution to Education 
in Asia and Africa,” in “Christian Education in Africa and 
the Hast,” p. 11. 


Internationalism has no sound and firm basis save in 
Christian principles and ideals. And no one can take the 
principles and ideals of Jesus and His Gospel as authorita- 
tive throughout the range of human interests, and not 
believe in an international order, organized and maintained 
for the preservation of peace through the administration of 
justice, as both possible and necessary. All the demands 
now vocal for disarmament, for greatness through service, 
for the rights of weaker nations, for the substitution of rea- 
son for might, and law for war, for the putting of interna- 
tional intercourse on a human instead of an animal basis, 
all these are thoroughly Christian in spirit and meaning 
and aim. And no one who sincerely professes to be a Chris- 
tian should fail to enlist among those who propose to bring 
in a new order of righteousness, and goodwill, and human 
brotherliness.—William Pierson Merrill, “Christian Inter- 
nationalism,” pp. 142, 148. 


The outstanding fact of the post-war position is this, 
that economic world-unity has actually arrived, while spir- 
itual world-unity is not yet in sight. The nations are tied 
together by an economic interdependence which they can- 
not escape; they are kept apart by the absence of mutual 
sympathy. As a writer in the Round Table has put it, “The 
attainment of a world-commonwealth is the inexorable con- 
dition of world-freedom. . . . This final freedom is not 
yet in sight, for the spiritual basis of the world-common- 
wealth is as yet lacking.” We have not yet enabled the 
one great Reconciler to stand forth visibly among the 
nations, as they strive in their house of bondage, and say 


World Peace val 


to them in terms which compel assent: “Sirs, ye are 
brethren !” 

It is only a vast extension of missionary work that will 
enable Him to do it. The missionary is the one true builder 
of the world-commonwealth, on which the human future 
depends, by bringing men everywhere into the experience 
of Christ’s Atonement—making them one with each other 
because one with God in Him.—E. A. Burroughs, “The 
Missionary Motive,” in “The Vision of the Kingdom.” Re- 
port of the Missionary Congress of the Scottish Churches, 
Glasgow, Scotland, 1922, p. 19. 


The suggestion that any other people are harboring a 
hostile intent toward us is a very serious charge to make. 
We would not relish having our honorable motives and 
peaceful intentions questioned; others cannot relish having 
any of us question theirs. ... “Peace is an adventure in 
faith.”—President Coolidge, Address to the Graduating 
Class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, June, 1925. 


CHAPTER VI 
MISSIONS AND A WORLD OUTLOOK 


QUESTIONS 


A. Humanity as One Family. 


1. 


bo 


Are we to think of humanity as one vast family, with 
like hopes and fears and needs, and with common 
interests, or as composed of a large number of racial 
and national groups, each having its own character- 
istics and interests, and these interests sometimes 
being consonant with those of other groups, and some- 
times in conflict? What considerations would lead 
us to think of humanity in the former way? What in 
the latter way? What present-day factors actually 
tend to develop a unified view of the world? What 
factors tend toward a contrary result? 


. Given the first conception, what obligations to the 


other members of the human family is upon each great 

social group? Which of the following would you 

include in your answer? To what, if any, would you 

attach qualifications? } 

a. To share the strains incident to calamity and 
catastrophe. 

b. To share the spiritual outlook and larger hope for 
the race. 

ce. To share the heritage of knowledge and social ex- 
perience. 

d. To share opportunity and economic privilege. 


. In what ways are these methods of sharing life 


actually in process here and in mission lands? What 
112 


A World Outlook 1138 


part in the process has the missionary enterprise, at 
home or abroad? 

4, Given the second conception of humanity as consist- 
ing of a multitude of large groups having more or less 
conflicting interests, in what way do conflicts become 
manifest? Are these conflicts increasing or decreas- 
ing in number and degree of intensity? Why? What 
contribution is made by missions toward alleviating 
strain and tension in relationships between groups 
or between individuals? What more, if anything, 
might missions do in this connection? 


B. Unchristianized Aspects of the Life of the World Family. 


1. What are the major social and economic ills of the 
world life? Are these ills especially characteristic of 
certain nations or races? If so, of which? Is any 
great group free from them? Which one? Are the 
causes of these ills to be found in social immaturity, 
in social maladjustment, or, as some claim, in the plain 
“human nature” of individual folks? Are the remedies 
to be sought in education, in social change, in indi- 
vidual regeneration, or in some other solvent of diffi- 
culties or cure of ills? 

2. Viewing humanity as a whole, what lack or need 
especially characterizes these countries to which 
missionaries go? What lack or need especially char- 
acterizes the United States? 

3. Is the difficulty of Christianizing these aspects of mod- 
ern life due to faults of emphasis in the teaching of 
the Churches? If so, how and where? If not, wherein 
do the difficulties lie? 

4, In promoting the work of missions what opportunities 
do you see for Christian experiment looking toward 
better industrial and racial relations? What experi- 
ments would you like to see tried? Where would you 
like to see them tried? 


114 


Missions and World Problems 


C. Need at Home for the Help of Worthy Life Values Emerg- 
ing from a Developing Christian Enterprise Abroad. 


1. What are the peculiar characteristics, if any, of occi- 


dental Christianity? What are its strongest features? 
What are its chief weaknesses? Where would the best 
characteristics of Western Christianity, if transplant- 
able, be most likely to be of high service to developing 
Christian groups elsewhere? Are there lacks or needs 
in so-called Christendom which might conceivably be 
met by a shared life to which European and Asiatic 
and African Christianity would contribute? If so, 
what are they? How could our needs and inade- 
quacies best be ministered to from these lands? 


. What particular values in fulfilling our inadequate 


life are to be hoped for from the developing churches 
in Japan, in Korea, in China, in India, in Africa? 
From the older Churches in Europe? Whence in these 
countries would we expect to get the most inspiring 
lessons of sacrifice, simple-heartedness, faith, prayer- 
fulness, the values of meditation, love of music, love 
of the beautiful, etc.? What bearing has the diversity 
of spiritual gifts among the different human groups 
on the question of the adequacy of Christianity to 
meet the moral and spiritual needs of the whole world? 


In view of the conclusions to which you may have come 
as a result of all these studies, how would you express the 
purpose of and motive for missions? How bound the field 
within which missions should be carried on? 


QUOTATIONS 


The world has grown very small in these modern days. 
The life of peoples has become most intricately interde- 
pendent. In commerce, in international intercourse, in our 
intellectual life, etc., we have felt the need of more and 
better representatives from each other so that our increas- 
ingly interlocking life may develop smoothly and helpfully. 


A World Outlook 115 


Surely in the spiritual sphere, too, a new era has dawned. 
In this phase of our life, where the really deep and funda- 
mental things of our being lie hidden, where the forces and 
impulses which determine all our actions spring from, we 
too need a greater number of representatives and ambassa- 
dors to bring to each other the best and deepest in us, 
which is the only way we can call into being the new world 
order which we today are all yearning for.—T. Z. Koo, at a 
Conference on International and Missionary Questions, 
Manchester, England, January, 1925. 


The great issue of the larger life of peoples in Asia today, 
as throughout the world, is how to build a nation under 
conditions of increasing democracy. That it cannot be 
done by mere statecraft is increasingly clear to all. That 
it can be done only through an infinity of human reciprocity 
is coming home to the minds of many Japanese, Chinese, 
and Indian patriots. That Christianity alone among world 
forces, as it lays hold completely on life, can do this, not 
a few of them begin to discern. With almost pathetic 
readiness for its concrete approach to them and their 
baffling problems but also with a certain bantering aloof- 
ness, they are asking whether the Christian forces have it 
in them to press an advantage which hardly the mountain 
overcoming faith could a little while ago have envisaged. 
So clear is this strategic opportunity of Christianity to 
many leaders of Oriental opinion that it is not difficult to 
discern among them a certain mood of sympathetic banter. 
Is Christianity going to press to the utmost the almost 
inconceivable advantage which is opening up? Is that 
quality of moral adventure in it, which is so strongly called 
out by opposition and danger, going to be equal to the 
challenge of a vast available opportunity, into which the 
situation would almost compel it to come?—Robert A. 
Woods, Boston, speaking before the Foreign Missions Con- 
ference of North America, January, 1921. From report of 
the Conference, p. 169. 


. Every meal that we eat, every fabric we wear, is linked 
up by invisible threads of connection with the labor of 
African negroes, South Sea Island plantation boys, and 
the orchards of Nearer Asia. The world is one today in an 
inextricable interdependence of labor, of commerce, of foods 
and fabrics. . . . This amazing contraction of space, this 


116 Missions and World Problems 


incredible expansion of our range of expression, this posi- 
tively bewildering multiplication of our contacts as indi- 
viduals and as nations—all achieved by the technical 
miracles and modern applied sciences—could be illustrated 
in a thousand arresting ways. But a larger issue lies 
behind. : 

With these physical interactions and these mechanical 
and commercial links that bind the human family into this 
state of inextricable interdependence there goes an infinite 
ramification of moral and intellectual and spiritual con- 
tacts and relationships which transform life and are with 
startling speed creating a new mind in the world, pro- 
pounding new enigmas for statesmen, confronting with an 
almost wholly fresh challenge the statesmanship of the 
Christian forces.—Basil Mathews, “The New World Situa- 
tion,” in “The Vision of the Kingdom.” Report of the Mis- 
sionary Congress of the Scottish Churches, Glasgow, Scot- 
land, 1922, pp. 94, 95. 


Even people who cannot read at all are having their 
minds changed. In some parts of the Far East there are 
more cinemas in proportion to the population than there 
are in London. And the film tells to the people of every 
Asiatic race in the language that any man, woman or child, 
however ignorant, can understand—i. e., the language of the 
picture—the story of the world’s life. The “Deadwood 
Dick” Wild West cowboy type of film has so stung the imagi- 
nation of the Chinese boy of sixteen that he has been firing 
off revolvers in Buffalo Bill’s best style, and a censorship 
has had to be established in some centres to stop the import 
of this sort of drama. The film flickers before the eyes of 
the East not only the wild feats of Buffalo Bill and the 
antics of Charlie Chaplin, the Oxford and Cambridge boat- 
race and Sherlock Holmes, but the race-conflict (as in the 
prizefight between the Negro Siki and the Frenchman, Car- 
pentier), and the passionate romances of the West, that 
degrade the white woman in the eyes of the East. He con- 
templates with oriental reflectiveness the battle scenes of 
the Somme and the surrender of the German navy. Behind 
those impassive, inscrutable faces, as they sit in their cin- 
emas or study in their classrooms, the new thoughts of the 
West are creating fresh ambitions for the East——Basil 
Mathews, “The Clash of Colour,” p. 43. 


A World Outlook 117 


It is difficult to speak of European problems, since all 
problems are now more or less world problems. Such ques- 
tions as disarmament, immigration and emigration, far 
from interesting our continent alone, interest equally over- 
seas populations. The crisis passed through by the world 
between 1914 and 1919 is the first instance where the larger 
portion of the human race—almost, in fact, the whole— 
were involved. Out of the 1,750 millions of the earth’s 
human beings,.1,550 millions are among belligerent nations. 
The narrow limits of European territory, the density of its 
population, its races and the traditions held in common, 
render our quarrels specially dangerous for the world at 
large and complicate our material problems through innum- 
erable sentimental side issues. The aspect of the problems 
may be European, their incidence is world-wide-—William 
Martin, at a Conference on International and Missionary 
Questions, Manchester, England, January, 1925. 


Those great evils against which we have to fight in the 
name of God are not confined geographically or conditioned 
by race. Goodness and evil alike know no boundaries. 
The devlopment of the opium evil in China sweeps back 
upon Europe and the drug peril becomes international. 
The immorality of one people sooner or later becomes a 
world menace. As an influenza scourge sweeps around the 
world without distinction of color or place so the forces 
that destroy the souls of men pass from nation to nation. 

In the face of an outburst of world greed, nations retain 
the generous ideals of days gone by only with the utmost 
difficulty. The reinforcement of the powers of goodness for 
all the peoples of the world becomes one of the outstanding 
needs of the hour. Moral ideals and vitalizing energies 
for good have international scope and world-wide power.— 
Nelson Bitton, “The New World Situation,” in “The Vision 
of the Kingdom. ” Report of the Missionary Congress of 
the Scottish Churches, Glasgow, Scotland, 1922, p. 106. 


The indigenous inhabitant of the tropical and _ sub- 
tropical regions is fast awakening to the injustices imposed 
upon him; he is learning that the white man cannot do 
without him; he now knows that in literature, commerce, 
politics, and industry, there is no height to which he can- 
not ultimately attain, and he is demanding with ever-in- 
creasing force and power, his place in the world—he does 


118 Missions and World Problems 


not ask in sentimental language for the place of a brother, 
but he is determined to reach, in every sphere, the full 
stature of a man.—John H. Harris, “The Economic Exploi- - 
tation of the Tropics,” in “Western Races and the World,” 
Kidited by F. 8. Marvin, p. 227. 


The desire to be admitted into the human family with- 
out reserves or compromises, without outbursts of indigna- 
tion or smiles of derision, will tomorrow fill the heart of 
the whole of Africa—Georges Hardy, “Vue Générale de 
V’Histoire d’Afrique,’ p. 173, quoted in The International 
Review of Missions, October, 1924, p. 488. 


Reverence for life, an interest in persons as persons, the 
Spirit of justice and fair play, sympathy with one’s fellow- 
men and the desire to serve them and the purpose to seek 
first the Kingdom of God are the qualities which, expressed 
in the lives of individuals, promote racial understanding and 
goodwill. If the home and the school succeed in forming 
these dispositions, those who possess them will not be found 
wanting when the time comes to apply habits acquired in a 
more restricted environment to wider relations. An ounce 
of humor, of human understanding, of the sense of fair 
play, of the instinct for dealing with men may often be 
worth more than pounds of admirable racial theory.—J. H. 
Oldham, “Christianity and the Race Problem,” p. 244. 


I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted 
with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, 
who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens, and 
the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position 
of others will be the fittest to take their permanent place 
in the age that is lying before us, and those who are con- 
stantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of 
aliens will be eliminated. For this is the problem before 
us, and we have to prove our humanity by solving it 
through the help of our higher nature. The gigantic organ- 
izations for hurting others and warding off their blows, 
for making money by dragging others back, will not help 
us. On the contrary, by their crushing weight, their 
enormous cost and their deadening effect upon the living 
humanity they will seriously impede our freedom in the 
larger life of a higher civilization. 

During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of 


A World Outlook 119 


brotherhood was limited by geographical boundaries, be- 
cause at that time those boundaries were true. Now they 
have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of the 
qualities of real obstacles. So the time has come when 
man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact with all 
seriousness or perish. The first impulse of this change of 
circumstance has been the churning up of man’s baser pas- 
sions of greed and cruel hatred. If this persists indefinitely 
and armaments go on exaggerating themselves to unimagin- 
able absurdities, and machines and store-houses envelop 
this fair earth with their dirt and smoke and ugliness, then 
it will end in a conflagration of suicide. Therefore man 
will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision 
to make another great moral adjustment which will com- 
prehend the whole world of men and not merely the frac- 
tional groups of nationality. The call has come to every 
individual in the present age to prepare himself and his 
surroundings for this dawn of a new era when man shall 
discover his soul in the spiritual unity of all human beings. 
—Rabindranath Tagore, “Nationalism,” pp. 121-123. 


Not long ago Christian nations were engaged in a mortal 
struggle and the scramble for spoils is not yet over. Each 
nation prayed for victory in arms. This was bad enough, 
but today in Africa and elsewhere the name of God is used 
by white men in their demand for preferential treatment 
and power, and out in America nominal Christians hound 
the Negro to death. The East is said to be sleepy and un- 
progressive but the West while making material progress 
seems to be degenerating in the spiritual sense. It seems 
to be going back from the teachings of Christ to Jehovah, 
the war God of the Old Testament. Western countries or 
their colonies have closed their doors to the crowded popula- 
tions of the East but they are ever seeking advantages in 
the Orient. Any eastern land that is averse to foreign 
intrusion is termed barbarous and unprogressive but the 
same terms are not applied to western peoples who adopt 
the same methods. Further, accounts even of countries 
long settled by Orientals dwell on the rich and healthy 
parts of these lands that might yet be colonized by Euro- 
peans. In the midst of all this comes the missionary from 
the West and preaches “Peace and goodwill on earth.” 
Oh, the tragedy of the situation! 


120 Missions and World Problems 


The western Church comes to the East with a shell on its 
back. The East wonders whether it can cramp itself into 
this shell without endangering its self-respect, freedom and 
existence. It is not Christ that is questioned but the Church 
in its modern garb. That is the cause of the whole ques- 
tion. At least some Christians out here realize that they 
will themselves have to help in solving the problems that 
face our Church, and thanks be to the few from the West 
who do their utmost to help, guide and encourage them 
in the attempt.—H. W. Mediwaka, International Review of 
Missions, January, 1924, pp. 58, 59. 


Actually then, what kind of fraternity has Christendom 
offered as a substitute to Islam? What sort of Catholi- 
cism? What program for human unity? It is awful to 
have to put this question—and despairing shame prevents 
one from answering it. Catholicism!—with Christendom 
rent through and through, with hardly even the will to 
mend the rents! Fraternity!—with the poisonous atti- 
tude of the sects to one another in Islamic lands, and alas, 
not in these exclusively. Humanity!—when Christian 
brotherliness seems hardly even to mitigate, much less 
abolish, the bitterness between class and class, or the racial 
dislikes and downright hatreds between nation and nation! 
Truly in practice, Christian fraternity has been more 
limited than Islamic.—Rey. Canon Gairdner, “Racial and 
Religious Contacts in Near East,’ in “The Vision of the 
Kingdom.” Report of the Missionary Congress of the Scot- 
tish Churches, Glasgow, Scotland, 1922, p. 219. 


Since the days when the Church and the State became 
separated from each other, Christianity has practically 
ceased to hold the imagination of the people, and the sum- 
total of what we have in our modern world which, for the 
sake of convenience, we call modern Western civilization, 
has developed in spite of Christianity. In our scientific 
discoveries, in our social organizations, and especially in 
our political dealings with one another does any one have 
the presumption to say that there is even the slightest trace 
of Christian influence? The crowning stupidity in all his- 
tory, the War of 1914, is an irrefragable proof of the 
absence of Christian sentiments in the modern world of 
Europe and America. The supreme problem confronting 


A World Outlook 121 


the Western nations today is therefore not to send out mis- 
sionaries to China, to Japan, or to India, but to try to 
recover the religious heritage which they have lost. When 
they have done that again, missionaries will not be needed, 
because the rest of the world will then be drawn to the 
Christian religion as irresistibly as a pin to a magnet. The 
force of example is the essence of Confucian teaching; it 
should also be the essence of Christian teaching—Chang 
Hsin-Hai, Student World, January, 1924, pp. 22, 238. 


The non-Christian lands have not all been, nor always 
been, contemptuous of the material. Witness China. But 
they have been becoming profoundly suspicious of the ma- 
terialism of the West, and the war has confirmed them 
in their suspicions. The distrust of Japan, where Western 
materialism has most conquered, by other countries of the 
Orient is of vital significance. 

The “New-Tide-of-Thought” movement proclaims this 
from the housetops in China. Gandhi personifies it in 
India. That leader of three hundred millions is reported 
to have declared: “If I could say the word that would 
make India free tomorrow, and have her under the same 
sort of civilization that England has, I would keep silence.” 
—Paul Hutchinson, Atlantic Monthly, September, 1923, p. 
392. 


No one can be more concerned in this quest than the 
missionary. The days are past or passing in which there 
was a sharp contention between those whose great concern 
was to carry the Gospel to every nation and those who 
pleaded that this nation must first be made Christian, and 
then might safely carry its experience to the ends of the 
earth. It is clear now that there can be no postponement 
of the missionary task; it is impossible to wait until there 
shall arise a Christian nation, Christian through and 
through. It is not the divine way, it would seem, to let 
one task be completely finished by the Church before an- 
other is thrust upon it. The outgoings of Christian people 
cannot be checked. But at the same time no one knows 
better than the missionary how much the character and 
the power of his service depend upon the depth and inten- 
sity of the Christian life as it is set forth in Christen- 
dom. : 

The missionary . . . is embarrassed in his work by 


122 Missions and World Problems 


the knowledge that in Christian countries there is so much 
that is either non-Christian or sub-Christian, and that 
Christian society takes this as almost inevitable. The 
knowledge of this is becoming common property in Africa 
and the East. And it is not so much the imperfect obedi- 
ence that startles the observer, it is rather the acquiescence 
of Christians in conditions which are manifestly unworthy 
of their faith. 

Every faithful attempt therefore to apply Christianity 
to human society in the West will have far-reaching effects 
in the East.—Edward Shillito, International Review of 
Missions, October, 1924, pp. 586-587. 


The Church has been charged .. . with failure to make 
its principles effective in the life of the world today. The 
failure may have its partial explanation in the fact that the 
Church has not seriously undertaken the intellectual effort 
necessary to relate its conception of life to the actual con- 
ditions of modern society. Its teaching in regard to Chris- 
tian duty is not substantially different from what it was 
when the conditions of life were far simpler and the relations 
of individuals were mainly with other individuals. The 
mind of the Church has occupied itself with philosophical 
and theological problems, with the text and contents of the 
scriptures and with the history of its own past. But it has 
not set itself to grapple in earnest with the complexities of 
modern life and the problems which they create for the 
Christian conscience. It has consequently been unable to 
give to men the moral guidance that they need. It has often 
been impotent not because it was without an ideal but be- 
cause it lacked knowledge of the conditions which the ideal 
must transform.—J. H. Oldham, “Christianity and the Race 
Problem,” pp. 237, 238. 


If the advocates of Christianity are to produce any effect 
on Moslems, they must begin by saying that a majority of 
those who live in what are called Christian lands have prac- 
tically rejected the ethical standards of Christianity. They 
do not live its life, they do not practice its ethical teach- 
ings and they are constantly lapsing on the one side into 
gross superstition and on the other side into immorality 
and low standards of truth. It is only a very small share 
of what constitutes the area and the population ordinarily 


A World Outlook 123 


defined as Christian which even approximates to Christian 
ethics. 2 

The strongest bar to the conversion of Moslems to Chris- 
tianity is not the hardness of heart of the Moslems, but the 
failure of the hearts of Christians to lead Christian lives. 
Give the world one hundred per cent Christianity and the 
world, Moslems included, will become one hundred per cent 
Christian. While our business, our marriages, divorces 
and remarriages, our laws, our government and our poli- 
tics, the labor of children in Christian lands, the oppres- 
sion of the poor that have no helper, the unjust distribu- 
tion of our whole economic system—while these things 
remain, and are known by all the world, the example of 
Christianity will leave the world as it is today two-thirds 
Moslem and non-Christian. 

In vain, do we send forth millions of treasure and thou- 
sands of missionaries and sow the words of Christ in every 
tongue, unless Christian lives and Christian institutions, 
in thought, word and deed, are present in all Christian 
lands. Let us confess our sins before Almighty God and 
our fellowmen, proclaim in Moslem lands the teachings of 
Christ, but cease to vaunt Christianity until we have made 
our lives Christian and Christianity itself, Christian.— 
Talcott Williams, The Moslem World, January, 1925, pp. 
22, 25. 

Contact with non-Christian students forces one to 
reiterate that we must frankly face the issues raised by 
Jesus Christ in our social and national life. The appalling 
results of the failure to attempt to relate Christianity to 
politics, commerce, and industry, amounting to a practical 
denial of Christ, are the most fatal hindrance to the ac- 
ceptance of the Gospel. The only effective preaching is the 
living of the Gospel, and until the whole of life, both cor- 
porate and individual, is Christianized, there can be no 
complete answer to those who hold another faith.—J. O. 
Dobson, Student World, January, 1924, p. 40. 


Each man can see his own Civilization with the eyes of 
love; he singles out the best in it as normal, the worst is 
glossed over; but when he looks at another civilization he 
has another standard; he is tempted to compare his best 
with the worst in all others. The Westerner will tell the 
Easterner that caste is a grave evil from which the West 


124 Missions and World Problems 


is free; but the Indian soon learns that caste though dis- 
guised is not unknown in the West. He hears perhaps from 
one missionary that womanhood and family life are hal- 
lowed in the West, and are not as in the Hast; and he an- 
swers, “You speak of the purity of your family life and 
contrast it with the worst in our land. We read your 
divorce cases and we know the shame of your city streets; 
and if these are an example of your Christian civilization, 
we are not impressed by it.” So the barren controversy 
proceeds. Each side is tempted to put forward its best; 
and there is no just comparison possible. The fault must 
lie in part with us; by our calm assumptions we put the 
Indians on the defensive. If we saw things from the first 
with the bold freedom of an understanding fellowship, we 
should not awaken the resentful retort. We should go 
with humility of spirit; and humility always awakens 
humanity; for humility takes the lowest place; and it is 
there men come into fellowship—Edward Shillito, Inter- 
national Review of Missions, April, 1921, p. 178. 


The missionary is not responsible for everything in the 
West. He need not try to explain everything. He should 
certainly not try to justify everything in the lands from 
which he comes. No amount of whitewashing can cover 
up the black spots in our own beloved home lands. Some 
of the things at home we frankly regret, and among them 
is the attitude that many of our people take towards our 
Oriental brethren. We can only apologize for it and do 
what we can to improve that attitude—C. J. L. Bates, 
Japan Evangelist, August-September, 1919, p. 290. 


The Church must aim at manifesting Christianity as 
what it essentially is—a world religion; and it must at the 
Same time reveal it, as not only challenging everywhere 
those forces of “the world” which its members renounce, 
but actually projecting and, as far as lies within its power, 
building up a social fabric constructed in despite of them. 
As regards the first point, it must be clear that if the 
Church is to win the world it can only be by conceiving 
and presenting itself as a Society to which every part of 
the world has a unique and essential contribution to make. 
Yet it is this ecumenical character that the Church has in 
recent ages so largely lost. Even the vast extent of mis- 
Sionary effort scarcely avails to qualify this statement, 


A Worid Outlook 125 


since the Faith and the ceremonies associated with it are 
offered to men of other races in a far too exclusively Euro- 
pean, or even national form. Even when we succeed in 
interpreting our religion in an international sense, we are 
too inclined to stop short at the confines of the white race; 
we fail to carry it forward to that inter-racial conception 
which is alone adequate to express its true content. Yet 
the problems we are apt to describe as international are 
often more correctly conceived as inter-racial. And if the 
Church is to meet them, it must do so as an inter-racial 
body in the fullest sense. We have hardly begun to realize 
how greatly Christianity might be enriched by incorporat- 
ing the spiritual experiences and intellectual qualities of 
other races than our own, to say nothing of the develop- 
ments in liturgical expression and ecclesiastical art which 
a truly universal Church might be expected to manifest.— 
“International Relations,” C.O.P.E.C. Commission Reports, 
Vol. VII, pp. 122, 123. 


The new atmosphere of thought in which men and women, 
today, in widely separated countries, are working for better 
social and international relationships is the justification 
for re-examining problems that have hitherto been con- 
sidered insoluble; and the reason for attacking these prob- 
lems with hopefulness is that through the fulfillment of the 
new demands for world-wide cooperation the highest reli- 
gious aspirations of mankind will find ever fuller expres- 
sion, the demands themselves being the outcome of a clearer 
understanding of the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ. 
—Janet Harvey Kelman, “Labor in India,” pp. 7, 8. 


Looking further still into the future, we may see the day 
approaching when the Churches of the great Eastern lands, 
so far importers of Christian teaching and guidance, will 
begin an export traffic to the Western Church of a value 
which as yet we have no standards to measure. /The 
World’s Student Christian Federation, which met in 
Peking in 1922, discussed social questions, and notably the 
problem of war, and drew much that gave life and point 
to its discussions from the fearless, energetic thinking of 
the younger Christian students of India, China and Japan. 
The Shanghai Conference, about the same time, laid down 
canons for the improvement of industrial conditions with 
a courage which should inspirit other Churches. . . . In 


126 Missions and World Problems 


India I met a young Indian leader, facing the problem of 
the education of his particular community and leading a 
radical movement for a new type of Christian college. I 
can mention here only two of the thoughts that moved 
him most. The first was that his community must be put 
into a position of unity with other communities till now 
thought to be its rivals, and that this unity must be re- 
garded as an instrument for the service of India as a whole. 
Second, that it was waste of time to talk of Christianity 
for India today, unless it was aiming with more literal 
faith to accept and apply the New Testament standards in 
regard to wealth, rank, brotherhood and all the organiza- 
tions of daily life. Such voices from the East will speak 
to the Churches of the West with a startling emphasis, and 
we shall receive their message as something which God 
could speak only through Eastern lips——Frank Lenwood, 
C. O. P. E. C. Commission Reports, Vol. XI., pp. 215, 216. 


The whole missionary enterprise depends on the existence 
in Christian lands of men who carry on their hearts the needs 
of other men and who feel responsibility for the meeting of 
those needs. The radius of their brotherhood must be that 
of the human race. It is a brotherhood which looks outward 
for its expression but upward for its warrant—a brotherhood 
born of the Christian religion, resting on the common Father- 
hood of God and the universality of Jesus Christ, and pro- 
ceeding upon the assumption that the unit for our social 
thinking must be humanity. 

It is an immeasurable asset for any international organi- 
zation that in every land of the earth today there exists a 
body of men, larger or smaller, to whom it is natural to think 
of others in terms of brotherhood and friendship, whose 
habit of mind is to think of the merits instead of the demerits 
of men of other nations, who would rather believe well 
than ill of men around the globe, who understand the spir- 
itual language spoken by men of other tongues. Such 
groups have actually been built up by foreign missions all 
over the world. They put any great movement for the good 
of humanity in the position in which nascent Christianity 
found itself in the spread over the whole earth of the Jewish 
race, as a result of which there was everywhere a small or 
large group to whom the new doctrine could be presented 
intelligibly, among whom actually it did ordinarily take its 


A World Outlook 127 


first root. As a result of foreign missions thousands of men 
in all lands are already in league with one another at the 
deeper levels of life. 

The spirit of sacrifice must be formed in all nations. 
Everywhere, quietly, insistently, forcefully, men who believe 
in the spirit of service and sacrifice as over against the spirit 
of selfishness and distrust of others must propagate their 
faith. But where is there any adequate basis for such a 
spirit except in the Gospel of Christ? And where is such a 
spirit so marked as in foreign missions? Foreign missions 
is the test of it and the greatest single manifestation of it 
anywhere. The missionaries themselves are exemplifying it 
—they are on foreign fields for other men’s sake. ; 
In every non- Christian land the Christians constitute the 
one group whose faith carries this spirit as part of its 
inescapable logic_—“The Missionary Outlook in the Light of 
the War,” pp. 19, 21. 


So we live our wonderful and romantic modern life, our 
destinies visibly woven with those of people of every race 
and speech, our ordinary necessities coming from countries 
whose very names were unknown to our grandfathers. And 
yet, when we turn from the material facts to the ideas by 
which most of us live, how pitiably inadequate they are to 
the overwhelming facts. Most of our opinions are drawn 
from a very tiny circle, a family, or people who happen to be 
its friends, a village, a parish, so familiar that we probably 
never realize in the least how narrow the circle is. The 
largest unit most of us can apparently imagine at all is the 
nation. In national affairs, so little have the facts pene- 
trated into our thoughts, we generally take it for granted 
that every nation is self-sufficing, or could be, or ought to be, 
and has more or less reason to be afraid of every other and 
that its first and indeed almost its only duty is to itself. 
When the problems raised by our international affairs force 
themselves upon us, it is behind this great rampart of 
Nationalism that most of us retire—H. T. Jacka, “The Road 
to Christendom,” pp. 61, 62. 


If modern Christianity is something apart from the 
world’s real evils, from its springs of hatred and oppression 
and misery, then already, in spite of all appearances, it is 
as dead as the worship of Mithra. Most certainly any 
Church that admits distinctions on the ground of race, in the 


128 Missions and World Problems 


lives of its members, can have none but temporary success in 
Asia and Africa. In every recent struggle to extend men’s 
liberty or to abate their miseries the Church has taken no 
corporate action, and as many of its members have been on 
what proved to be the wrong side as on the side which now 
all recognize to have been right. So each victory of the right 
won without the Church’s help and in spite of the opposition 
of its leaders, as when slavery was abolished, or child labor 
in mines, weakens its appeal to be the guide of men’s con- 
sciences. This struggle over race domination and racial dis- 
abilities, in which innocent millions may perish, seems to 
threaten its very life. Europe and Asia, Europeans and 
Asiatics, European and Asiatic thought have for many cen- 
turies been drifting apart. Science, industry and politics 
have at length reestablished a contact that every year grows 
closer. But without a common sharing of the things of the 
mind, and of something of the fellowship of a corporate 
society, increasing contact can only bring increasing antago- 
nism. If that antagonism grows, the struggle of many ages, 
of which Greek and Persian, Saracen and Crusader were 
transitory protagonists, will again be renewed, but on a 
vaster, more destructive scale than ever before. None can 
foresee how reconciliation can come, whether from a Church 
in which the spirit of its founder is renewed, or from some 
new and as yet invisible source——Norman Leys, “Kenya,” 
pp. 374, 375. 


HELPFUL BOOKS 


These especially pertinent for this study are marked 

with * 

*Anesaki, Masaharu. The Religions and Social Problems 
of the Orient. N. Y., Macmillan, 1928. $1.00. 

Campbell, E. H. F. Christianity and International Moral- 
ity. Cambridge, Heffer, 1921. £0/3/-— 

Chirol, Valentine. The Occident and the Orient, Chicago, 
University of Chicago Press, 1924. $2.00. 

*Fairchild, Henry P. Immigration; a World Movement 
hy ts American Significance. N. Y., Macmillan, 1925. 

*Fleming, Daniel D. Whither Bound in Missions? N. Y., 
Association Press, 1924. $2.00. 

*Glasgow Missionary Congress, 1922. The Vision of the 
Kingdom. London, Marshall Brothers, 1922. £0/3/6. 

Gregory, J. W. The Menace of Colour. London, Seeley, 
Service, 1925. £0/12/6. 

King Hall, Stephen. Western Civilization and the Far 
East. N. Y., Scribner, 1924. $5.00. 

Marvin, Francis 8., ed. Western Races and the World. 
N. Y., Oxford University Press, 1922. $4.20. 

*Mathews, Basil. The Clash of Color. N. Y. Missionary 
Education Movement, 1924. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, 
$1.25. 

Newfang, Oscar. The Road to World Peace. N. Y., Put- 
nam, 1924. $2.50. 

Ogilvie, J. N. Our Empire’s Debt to Missions. London, 
Hodder & Stoughton, 1924. £0/7/6. 

*Oldham, J. H. Christianity and the Race Problem. N. Y., 
Association Press, 1924. $1.00. 


129 


AN APPENDIX FOR CRITICS 


Comments from those to whom proof sheets were sent and 
whose criticisms it was found impracticable to follow 
entirely or in part in the final proofreading: 


“In thinking of the groups of people who might use the 
syllabus, I am wondering how many will think the problems 
through to any kind of solution and how many will perhaps 
just become perplexed and think there is no solution, unless 
there is some suggestion of a way out, either through some 
sort of solution question or definite reference to some mate- 
rial which would point the way. ... Of course I realize 
that the main purpose is to arouse the thinking of the group 
and not to offer solutions.” 


“Would it not be possible in material like this to include 
more contrasting points of view? Since the quotations 
often present only one side of a question, those of us who are 
not well informed on all sides invariably feel handicapped 
by wondering what the other side would say. If there could 
be included for each question one or two brief clear em- 
phatic statements by people who hold opposite views I do 
believe that it would be more stimulating. 

“One disturbing question kept coming to my mind :—the 
syllabus practically ignores the main function of Christian 
missions, which is the winning of people to faith in Jesus 
Christ and to His spirit and point of view.” 


“The questions seemed to me penetrating and on the whole 
more likely to drag out discussion on what might be called 
orthodox lines than textbooks which I had seen hitherto. 
The references appeared to me unusually valuable, so far as 
I can tell from the time that I could give to their scrutiny. 

“My main question as to the whole study is not based upon 
the value of the questions, or upon the excellence of the 
references, but rather upon the underlying and basic ideas 
which it assumes. 

“The Inquiry exists to pioneer some new areas and it does 
not appear to me that you have done so in this study. Its 
point of view is, as I have said above, orthodox, that is, it 


130 


An Appendix for Critics 131 


assumes the entire missionary point of view as it exists in 
this country and merely approaches the subject from a dif- 
ferent angle of vision within that point of view. I had hoped 
that it might be a different contribution to the study, one 
which would challenge the very idea of missions and which 
would get it on to a cooperative basis rather than on to a 
sending of persons with a superior knowledge to deal with 
those who have inferior opportunities.” 


“T have been frequently impressed in leading mission 
study classes with the difficulty of conducting profitable 
discussions, simply because people knew so little that they 
were unable to use their common sense and had either to 
guess or to accept bodily some statement in the textbook or 
elsewhere. I feel, therefore, that your outline would have 
been greatly improved if it had had much more concrete data 
regarding conditions. ... 

“T realize that this large criticism, even if it has validity, 
comes entirely too late to do you any good. I would merely 
offer it for consideration in the drafting of future pamphlets. 
I think that the pamphlet as it stands will provoke a great 
deal of profitable discussion and do great good. I shall 
hope to use it myself, but shall plan to supplement some of 
the discussions with additional concrete material.” 


“The syllabus needs another chapter, the seventh, on ‘Mis- 
sions and the Missionary Message.’ World problems will 
never be solved except through regenerated men and women.” 


“In such questions as ‘What Oriental, African or island 
peoples were represented in the combatant forces of the 
war? although you give some general information on the 
subject, you ought to have more statistics to show the effect 
of the war on the whole world. 

“Point out more fully the measure of responsibility we 
have for the outside world—the world outside of jungles. 

“More reference to the problems of statesmanship. Get 
people to realize the possibility of making a contribution 
to the mission movement not by collection plate or through 
mission societies alone but through the whole attitude main- 
tained toward these peoples. For example, I wish we might 
have more quotations from people in the Orient with refer- 
ence to economic imperialism.” 


SOURCES QUOTED 


AUTHORS 


Allan, M. M., 33 

Anderson, Frank L., 14-15 
Andrews, C. F., 32-33, 86 
Atwater, Reginald M., 49-51 


Balme, Harold, 51-52 
Barbour, G. F., 52, 100-101 
Barton, James L., 52-53, 58-59 
Bates, C. J. L., 105, 124 
Bitton, Nelson, 76-77, 117 
Boas, Franz, 17 

Bruce, Roscoe Conklin, 26 
Burroughs, BE, A., 110-111 
Burton, Ernest D., 70-71 
Burton, Margaret E., 72-73 


Campbell, E. H. F., 102-103 
Campbell, Persia Crawford, 38- 
39 


Carlyle, A. J., 91 

Chandavarkar, Sir Narayan, 59 

Chang Hsin-Hai, 120-121 

Cheng Ching Yi, 106-107 

China Educational Commission, 
73-74, 91 

Chirol, Sir Valentine, 19-21, 55- 
57 


Coolidge, President, 111 


Dennett, Tyler, 42 

Doan, Robert A., 23 
Dobson, J. O., 123 
Dubarbier, George, 79-80 


Evans, Maurice, 60 


Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 43-45 
Fleming, Daniel. Johnson, 16-17, 
89-90, 108 
Fulani bin Fulani (pseud. of 
Norman Leys), 86-87 


Gairdner, Rev. Canon, 120 
Graham, J. H., 59 
Gregory, J. W., 25-26 


Hale, Edward Everett, 109 

Hall, Charles Cuthbert, 15 

Hamilton, Clarence H., 62-63 

Hardy, Georges, 118 

Harris, John H., 78-79, 117-118 

Hodgkin, Henry T., 71-72, 104- 
105 

Hooper, H. D., 23 

Hurrey, Charles DuBois, 24-25 

aces he Paul, 74-75, 84-85, 
12 


Ibuka, Kajinosuke, 41-42 


Jabavu, D. D. T., 99 
JACKS pe abel 

Johnson, F. Ernest, 92-93 
Johnston, Sir Harry, 77-78 


Kato, Katsuji, 17-18 

Kelman, Janet Harvey, 125 

King-Hall, Stephen, 27 

Koo, T. Z., 114-115 

Kpakpa-Quartey, Abdul Karim, 
24 


Kulp, Daniel H., 61 


LaMotte, Ellen N., 53-54 
Lenwood, Frank, 55, 63-64, 79, 
' 98-99, 125-126 
Lew, Timothy Tingfang, 54-55 
Leys, Norman, 27, 127-128. See 
also Fulani bin Fulani 
Lowell, A. L., 26 


Mabie, Hamilton W., 109 

McLean, J. H., 92 

Maclennan, Kenneth, 102 

MacMurray, J. V. A., 75 

Martin, William, 117 

Marvin, F. S., editor, 78-79, 91, 
117-118 

Mathews, Basil, 13-14, 21, 41, 71, 
73, 77, 99, 115-116 

Mediwaka, H. W., 119-120 


132 


Sources Quoted 1383 


Merrill, William Pierson, 110 Shillito, Edward, 90-91, 121-122, 
Miller, Herbert A., 18 123-124 

Speer, Robert E., 26, 40-41 
Newfang, Oscar, 58, 96-97 Stuart, J. Leighton, 105-106 


Nkomo, Simbini M., 24 
Ogilvie, J. N, 59-60 sor: “gp ONES yates 23-24, 85- 
Oldham, a ae 12-13, 57-58, 81-83, T’ang Yon iad 99-100 

87-88, 91-92, 109-110, 118, 122 Temple, Rt. Rev, W., 103 


Pe I og Tickell, Dora, 60-61 
: i -1 
Patton, Cornelius. H., 108-109 Wadia, P. A., 84 


inson Weatherford, W. D., 34-35 
Beebe e tonics White, Rt. Rev. Gilbert, 36-38 
Royce, Josiah, 21-22 Williams, D. R., 83-84 
Russell, Bertrand, 22 Williams, Talcott, 122-123 

Woods, Hon. Cyrus H., 39-41 
Saito, Soichi, 101 Woods, Robert A., 115 
Schweitzer, Albert, 97-98 
Shaw, Loretta L., 69-70 Yamamoto, Count, 107-108 


BOOKS AND PERIODICALS 


Africa in the Making—H. D. Hooper, 23 
American Mercury, 17 

Americans in Hastern Asia—Tyler Dennett, 42 
Atlantic Monthly, 84-85, 121 


Backward Peoples and Our Relations with Them—Sir Harry John- 
F ston, 77-78 

Black and White in South Africa—Maurice Evans, 60 

Business of Missions, The—Cornelius H. Patton, 108-109 


China and Modern Medicine—Harold Balme, 51-52 

China in the Family of Nations—Henry T. Hodgkin, 71-72, 104-105 

China Today through Chinese Eyes, 54-55, 89, 102, 106-107 

China’s Real Revolution—Paul Hutchinson, 74-75 

Chinese Coolie Emigration—Persia Crawford Campbell, 38-39 

Chinese Recorder, 18-19, 55-57, 61-62, 80-81 

Christ and Labour—C. F. Andrews, 32-33, 86 

Christian Education in Africa and the East, 33, 109-110 

Christian Education in China—China Educational Commission, 73- 
74, 91 

Christian Internationalism—William Pierson Merrill, 110 

Christian Movement in Japan, Korea and Formosa, The, 107-108 

Christianity and International Morality—EH. H. F. Campbell, 102-103 

Christianity and the Race Problem—J. H. Oldham, 57-58, 81-83, 118, 
122 

Christianity and the Religions of the World—Albert Schweitzer, 


Church Missionary Review, 69-70 


134 Missions and World Problems 


Clash of Colour, The—Basil Mathews, 13-14, 21, 41, 71, 73, 77, 99, 


116 

Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, Report 
of the, 55, 79, 124-125, 125-126 

Conference on Industrial Education, Allahabad, Report of the, 76 

Conference on International and Missionary Questions, Manchester, 
Report of the, 12-13, 103, 114-115, 117 

Creative Unity—Rabindranath Tagore, 85-86 


East and the West, The, 60-61 

Economic Journal, 84 

Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 

Ethics of Opium, The—Ellen LaMotte, 53-54 


Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, Annual meeting 
of the, 40-41 

Forces of the Spirit—Frank Lenwood, 63-64 

Foreign Affairs, 75, 109 

Foreign Missions Conference of North America, Annual meeting of 
the, 40-41; Report of the, 115 


Geographical Review, 35-36 
Human Progress through Missions—James L. Barton, 52-53 


Immigration—Henry Pratt Fairchild, 43-45 

International Review of Missions, 14, 52, 58-59, 70-71, 75-76, 81, 86- 
87, 87-88, 90-91, 91-92, 99, 100-101, 105-106, 118, 119-120, 121-122, 
123-124 

Islamic Review, 24 


Japan Evangelist, 41-42, 105, 124 
Kenya—Norman Leys, 27, 127-128 


Labor in India—Janet Harvey Kelman, 125 
Living Age, 79-80 


Menace of Colour, The—J. W. Gregory, 25-26 

Missionary Congress of the Scottish Churches, Report of the, 59, 
76-77, 102, 110-111, 115-116, 117, 120 

Missionary Outlook in the Light of the War, 126-127 

Missionary Review of the World, 14-15, 49-51, 62-63, 88-89 

Moslem World, 122-123 


National Christian Council Review, 76 
Nationalism—Rabindranath Tagore, 23-24, 104, 118-119 

Negro from Africa to America, The—W. D. Weatherford, 34-35 
Nouvelle Revue, La, 79-80 


Occident and the Orient, The—Sir Valentine Chirol, 19-21, 55-57 
Our Empire’s Debt to Missions—J. N. Ogilvie, 59- 60 


Problem of China, The—Bertrand Russell, 22 


Sources Quoted 135 


Race and Race Relations—Robert E. Speer, 26 

Race Prejudices and other American Questions—Josiah Royce, 21-22 
Races, Nations and Classes—Herbert A. Miller, 18 

Road to Christendom, The—H. T. Jacka, 127 

Road to World Peace, The—Oscar Newfang, 58, 96-97 

Round Table, 31-32, 33-34 


Social Problems and the East—Frank Lenwood, 98-99 
Student Volunteer Movement Bulletin, 23, 72-73 
Student World, 15-16, 17-18, 24, 24-25, 99-100, 120-121, 123 
Survey, 42-438, 92-93 


Thirty Years in Tropical Australia—Rt. Rev. Gilbert White, 36-38 
United States and the Philippines—D. R. Williams, $3-84 


Vision of the Kingdom, The, See Missionary Congress of the Scottish 
Churches 
Vue Générale de l’Histoire d’Afrique—Georges Hardy, 118 


Washington Foreign Missions Convention, Report of the, 23, 72-73, 92 

Western Civilization and the Far East—Stephen King-Hall, 27 

Western Races and the World—F. S. Marvin, editor, 78-79, 91, 11T- 
118 

Whither Bound in Missions—Daniel Johnson Fleming, 16-17, 89- 
90, 108 








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